


Min jistenna jithenna

by fruitzbat



Series: Aegis [4]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Fascist Italy - Freeform, Multi, Spanish Civil War, WWII
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 07:53:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 25,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28507014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fruitzbat/pseuds/fruitzbat
Summary: "E seppellire lassù in montagnaSotto l'ombra di un bel fiorTutte le genti che passerannoO bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciaoE le genti che passerannoMi diranno "che bel fior""A retelling of the Fascist period in Italy and World War II in the Mediterranean. In order to represent the reality as best as possible, multiple original characters are used.
Relationships: Germany/North Italy (Hetalia), Prussia/South Italy (Hetalia)
Series: Aegis [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/557924
Comments: 8
Kudos: 9





	1. Institutions

**Author's Note:**

> The final installment of the Aegis series. I'll be doing as much as I can during my winter break, then going to monthly updates (hopefully!) starting in February.

__ “That would be the third sabotage on the island this month.”

“This has gone on for far too long. Effective immediately, our top priority is to find that girl and bring her to heel.” Lovino had noticed that he would never use Serafina’s name. As much as he had promised the Sicilians, it did not seem that anyone had any real impetus to turn her over to him. No Sicilian in their right mind would turn themselves over to the mainland for safekeeping. 

“I’ll be calling Prefect Mori to see if he has any insights on this endeavor.”

“He’s retired—“

“I don’t give a  _ damn.  _ He will advise, but I expect Officer Paolo to supervise. Paolo will report to Palermo in three days’ time. I expect good results.” 

~~

_ You couldn’t fight crazy. But this was a different kind of crazy -- like a cut of meat that had been marinating in its own juices in order to become tender, Feliciano had been basted in fascist talking points, ceaselessly soaking in his own racism, to the point where he could recognize nothing else, talk about nothing else, live nothing else. The only people who could stand him were those who thought just like he did -- who were also the ones pouring on the extra marinade. He couldn’t even see who he was talking to -- that “Arab menace” he described looked quite similar to his half-brother, standing right in front of him. Lovino knew that there was no point in arguing with Feliciano. Lovino, instead, found himself thinking of his mother for the first time in a while.  _

_ “The situation in Fiume made me sick. The people are the only ones who care – it’s not like the government will help those stranded Italians across the ocean, or do anything of importance. They’d just put him to a vote of no confidence and have another election. Giolitti had only managed to stay in power as long as he has because he has never stood for anything; that’s true of all of them.”  _

_ Despite his better judgment, Lovino tried to cut in.  _

_ “Feli, that’s not true at all –“  _

_ “The only person who will listen to me, listen to us, is Mussolini. Don’t you get it? He’s our only hope at becoming whole again. He’s going to get rid of the Mafia. He’s going to get us Dalmatia. Isn’t that what we both want? What have those communists, those socialists, those _ liberals _ promised that they have actually delivered?”  _

~~

Antine was thinking about sex. This was not new – he was a grown man with needs – but there was something about the urgency that felt different. 

There was a point when they had been talking where Gramsci had asked him if he’d ever had a wife – if Antine remembered correctly, it was when he was talking about Julia. 

“No, never, and I don’t think I will for a long time. I’m far too young for that,” Antine had joked. 

Antine thought about sex any time he saw one of those underwear advertisements with the paintings of smooth, powdered-looking men with their perfectly oiled back hair. He thought about it every time he saw a man walk past wearing a very well fitting pair of trousers. He thought about it while watching movies and seeing the men carrying off the women – he didn’t know whether he wanted to be carried off or do the carrying. He thought about it at the grocery store, at the bank, on the ferry, in his backyard. He fell in love a little bit with any man who gave him a smile, attention,  _ a glance.  _ One strawberry blond fellow at the bar had given him his change and gently touched his hand in the process. It had put him out of commission for four days. 

Visiting Gilbert would probably only make it worse. But opting out would make it obvious that he was avoiding him. Living forever meant he could run forever, but it also meant his woes had far more stamina. 

By the time they’d reached Berlin, he had more than made his mind up and had called ahead to make it impossible to back out, utterly tormented on the train by the man sitting across from them with a Van Dyke beard he wanted to sit on. 

It was Feliciano who was designated the “voice” in these contexts for Italy as a whole; Lovino and Antine were brought along more as a formality, more as something to point at as a way to silence those who thought their new system was still one that favored the north. 

It did not sit well with him that his presence was being used as a cudgel. There was no way to change a system from within that demanded you six feet underground. But, then again, nobody except for a few strategic demographics were sitting comfortably these days. 

When Gilbert and Ludwig met them at the train station, Antine had to hide the fact that he was sweating. 

Everyone shook hands with a certain degree of stiff formality– even Ludwig and Feli, even though all the others present had accidentally overheard a late night phone call or twelve between them that they weren’t supposed to – and made their way to the embassy quarters where all three of them would be staying. All turned an eye to Feliciano slipping Ludwig a key to his hotel room. 

Antine felt like he was being sized up, but didn’t dare look up to see who was doing the sizing. 

Gilbert did not remember Antine being….handsome? Cute, sure. Adorable. Maybe it was the fact that he’d put on some weight. Ludwig and Feliciano immediately left for…. _ something.  _ Gilbert could barely look his brother in the eye anymore. Leave it to all the physical therapy Gilbert had needed to do to allow some other group of people to become Ludwig’s new family. 

Gilbert was pretending it didn’t hurt. He was not doing a very good job. Lovino was looking at him expectantly. 

“Want to come to my apartment and play a little backgammon first?” 

“Yes.” 

Meanwhile, Antine washed his face and tried to convince himself he wasn’t nervous. It wasn’t working. Coming out of his room, he immediately ran into the security guard tasked with making sure none of them committed any serious grievances. 

“I’ll be out – um, for coffee.”

“With who?”

“Um, a friend. Bye.” 

~~

Antine flung open the door with his shoulder rather than using his hands, surveying the waiting room for an empty seat -- only to catch a pair of green eyes staring at him. Laura Havemeyer was the last woman he’d expect to see in that waiting room. 

_ WHAT? Are you…? _

_ Yes, are YOU? _

_ Of course I am.  _

He immediately sat next to her, and acquiesced when she presented her hand to kiss. 

“You look  _ amazing,  _ how have you been?“

“Oh, it’s wonderful what some rouge and a new dress will do for you,” she teased, fluffing her skirt. It wasn’t just flattery -- Laura was absolutely glowing, a far cry from how he had seen the Belgian last. “We’re having our exposition right now and I can’t  _ believe  _ how much good it does for one’s health.” 

“I’m assuming you’re not here for a spa treatment.” 

“No. And neither are you?”

“No.” 

“You know they’ll have to poke and prod you.” 

“Yes – I’ve heard. But I can put up with it, so long as they can help me.” 

She nodded. 

“Surely you aren’t just up here to get some work done, Antine?” 

“I’m here in official business, but...I’m a sheep-infested island north of anywhere that matters to them, so I more or less do as I please these days. Provided I stay out of sight and out of mind. What about you?” 

“I’m...getting better. Still not perfect. You know how it is, I suppose?” 

He nodded. 

He was called back before Laura was, to both their surprise – perhaps they’d had fewer cases like his?

“Oh, let’s catch up later – drinks? Tomorrow night?”

He looked back over his shoulder at her. 

“Absolutely. Where can I reach you?” 

The Belgian handed him a scrap of paper with the phone number of her hotel room. 

Antine settled his body into the chair in the same way a snake settles itself into a crack in a cliff face. The examiner had kind eyes and a stern mouth – another example of a good beard, as well. His pen was already in his right hand when Antine had arrived, marking the date and time before beginning on his note taking. 

“What is your name?” 

“My name is….” Yes, it was pompous, but this was always a struggle in situations where he was expected to be autobiographical – full, official name? What his mother had named him? Or just first and last current pronunciation, as was expected? 

Hm. Fuck it. 

“It’s a very long story, but I’ve lived a long time and have a long name as a result. My full name is Ahirom Konstantinos Bōdashtart Pecora, Manifestation of the Island and Kingdom of Sardinia. But—for the purposes of this interview and for the lungs of those around me, most refer to me as Antine or Herr Pecora.” 

_ He  _ was lucky –his heart went out to any of these countries out East or in Africa with new names totally foreign to their languages and cultures — but he digressed. 

“You speak very good German.” 

“Thank you.” 

“Now, please tell me – why are you here?” 

“I am what I believe you call a hermaphrodite, or a transsexual, and an invert -- all three, and would like to pursue the possibility of surgery to give myself more male features.” 

“Could you please explain yourself?” 

“I was born and called a girl for much of my early childhood due to my genitalia – it did not sit right with me, even then. I think my mother thought that I wanted to be more like my twin brother. But…I had a female cousin, and the way she talked about being a girl wasn’t something I ever identified with, but I identified with the way my brother and uncle talked about their masculinity. And when…” he paused, trying to think of a gentler way to phrase what he was about to say but giving up, “…when my family was kidnapped and sold after the sacking of the city, I said I was a boy. No one really questioned it – nobody had the time. I kept my face and my body as hidden as physically possible to make it easier to…to pass as a boy. My mother was kept in a different part of the palace from my brother and I and our cousins.” 

“Why did you hide it?” 

“I don’t know. I said I was a boy before I saw what the Romans did to female captives in particular, so there was no real motivation from…from avoiding…”

“I understand.” 

“At any rate, I have lived as a man ever since then.” 

“Your appearance is very masculine.” 

“That’s the other thing. I don’t know how it happened – my theory is because of the famine I went through right before going through puberty, it perhaps affected how I grew. So I have no breasts. I have hair on my face, as you can see—“ Antine pointed to his own dark mustache. “– and I have a lower voice.” 

“And you said you are an invert?” 

“Yes – I only desire sexual contact with men.” 

“And you’ve had sex with men?” 

“Well, yes and no, that depends on what you define as “sex”.” 

“Herr Pecora, sex is anything done between people with the purpose of being sexual.” 

“In that case, yes. But I do not use my own genitals for that purpose – I have other means of doing so, apparatuses, et cetera, but should I solicit sexual service from someone they would immediately know from looking at me that I’m a hermaphrodite, so I have never done so out of fear of…”

“Of what?”

“Oh, I don’t know, the wrong people learning about it? My people being afraid of me? Being renounced for being unnatural? My own race– us manifestations – we don’t care too much. I’m not the only one, I’m not the first, and I certainly won’t be the last of my kind. But sometimes, others overhear what we say between us. Things that are acceptable to us, since we are so old and don’t have the energy to care that much anymore, are not acceptable to you. It’s  _ humans  _ I worry greatly about.” 

“So, for clarification, your inversion is such that you will sexually service men, but do not feel comfortable with them servicing you.” 

“Yes, although I do feel a desire for it,” he admitted, still thinking about Gilbert’s arms. 

The interview continued on for about another forty-five minutes before he was asked to take his clothes off and step near the examining table. Antine stood there in his drawers and socks before feeling compelled to take those off too, fighting the urge to cover up. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d stood so nude in such bright lights – and in front of two people, even. 

“Are you comfortable with being photographed during the examination process?” 

“Yes.” 

“Would you please take off your sunglasses?” 

“I’m naked enough, no?” 

Finally, the examiner laughed. Antine stood to his full height, arms at parade rest, while having his photo taken. He was then finally compelled to lie back on the examination table. He could still hear the camera whirring -- would he ever see these images, he wondered? 

“Hmm. I understand what you mean when you use both the term “hermaphrodite” and “transsexual”. Give me the speculum,” the examiner said to his assistant. 

~~

Gilbert and Lovino were left to their own devices and found themselves at a homophile bar that Lovino had never seen the likes of. 

“So tell me,” Gilbert started, looking around furtively before he began to speak. “How do  _ you  _ feel about Mussolini?” 

“He’s…” It was Lovino’s turn to glance around before speaking in hushed tones. 

“Is your Latin still any good?”

“Mm.” 

Lovino switched to his father’s tongue and hoped the ex-Templar could keep up. 

“He’s a fool. He’s a braggart, and a bully. But we’ve had fools, braggarts, and bullies for our prime ministers before.” 

“Never for quite this long and never quite like this, from what I can tell.” 

“True. Why do you ask?” 

“I don’t know if you’ve been paying much… _ attention  _ to the politics here in Berlin. But this Bavarian – or is he Austrian? I can’t remember off the top of my head – fellow, has been catching a lot of attention and he says he’s got a great admiration for your Mussolini.” 

“Oh?”

“The General Elections are coming up and he looks like he’s been getting a lot of support. There are only fourteen people in his party in our parliament right now, but it’s looking like there will be more soon.” 

“Who do  _ you  _ support?”

“I don’t support anyone. Lutz is into him—“

“ _ What? _ ”

“I know, trust me. Why do you think him and your little brother are thick as thieves? Everyone else thinks he’s crazy. I know a couple people who are supporters of his, but I don’t know if—” 

“I’ll say this much: if you know he’s entertaining that sort of thing already, nip it at the bud. I didn’t do that with Feliciano; I had no idea, I was paying attention to…other things. I’ll regret it till the day I die.” 

“What am I supposed to say? ‘I know everything is hard right now, and it’s easy to fall on your basic instincts of –“

Lovino shook his head. 

“No. These people have  _ always  _ existed, and the feelings they’re talking about have for a long time too. What they’re doing is unearthing something, not unveiling a new invention.” 

Gilbert raised an eyebrow. 

“I’ve…I’ve been thinking about this a lot. In Italy, the feelings are the same and have been that way for a long time. The government is streamlined, but I’d say it’s mostly the same, too. There are still lots of the same people, and he’s under the jurisdiction of the King still. It’s just that…now it’s more obvious who the government is for and who the government protects.” 

“Hmm.”

“It’s not always the figurehead you need to watch. It’s all the little elections: the clerks, the judges, offices like that. They…you know how sometimes in science fiction, they make a space inhabitable for humans on a desolate planet? That’s what they do to a democracy. They…convert it. It doesn’t just happen overnight, but it is relentless.”

Gilbert looked at him and briefly saw the young freedom fighter he’d taught how to load a needle gun. How hopeful he’d been, not even a century ago. It made his chest hurt. 

“So I guess I would tell you to keep a close eye on  _ everyone,  _ not just general elections.” 

Gilbert lifted up Lovino’s palm and kissed it, trying to keep from laughing when Lovino’s eyes widened. 

“Someone could  _ see us— _ “

“Have you looked around?” He defiantly kissed Lovino’s wrist, the ditch of his arm; Lovino finally caved and let Gilbert kiss his face. 

Neither of them saw a tall, bespectacled Sardinian open the door, witness the kiss, and immediately leave. 

~~

_ Always the groomsman, never the groom,  _ he sing-songed to himself as he walked, hands shoved into his pockets, as if he was the first and only gay man to ever feel disowned. He looked up and realized two things. Firstly, he was right in front of the Eldorado. Secondly, his pockets were absolutely stuffed with condoms. He then realized a third thing: the chances of anyone at that bar knowing who he was and caring what his situation was? Slim to none. 

Antine walked in, found a beautiful boy with blue eyes and a nice nose, got the two of them adequately hammered, went home with him, and acted accordingly. Moments before they’d begun, Antine had stood naked in front of him. He still did not know his name – about an hour afterwards, Antine would have left and would never see him again. 

“You’re incredible,” he had said. Antine had yet to decide whether or not to believe him. 

~~

Feliciano was enjoying Ludwig’s attention immensely, especially after they had been apart for so long. Ludwig didn’t remember Feliciano having been this  _ greedy  _ when they first started seeing each other. 

“Slow  _ down, _ ” he insisted, gently grabbing him by the hair and pulling him upwards to kiss him, giving him a brief interlude to wipe his face. 

“I’ve barely been able to look at your face since you got here.” 

“I’ve barely been able to  _ think  _ since I last  _ saw you, _ ” he retorted. 

“Everything will be fine. What happens, happens.” 

“But all of it will be for nothing--”

“It’s all worth something, Feli. Be more patient.” 

~~

Gilbert was thin enough that the jut of his pelvis practically cut Lovino’s palms. One of Lovino’s hands held him face down at the nape of the neck; the other held the two together. Gilbert came down from the high with the feeling of Lovino’s downy leg hair brushing up against the back of his thighs; Lovino finally collapsed on top of him, pressing his mouth to his shoulder blade. Gilbert’s skin looked like yellowed paper in the electric lighting. 

“You’re beautiful,” Lovino mumbled, propping himself up enough for Gilbert to finally roll onto his back. Gil responded by rolling his eyes. 

“You see beauty in  _ everyone _ . You ought to get your eyes checked.” 

“Mm, most people are beautiful. It’s their personalities I like or don’t like.” 

“At this rate you’re starting to sound like Francis.” 

“Francis?” 

“Oh, by the way, you can add that name to the long list of people who’d give you a throw.” 

Gilbert’s favorite version of Lovino was the one lost in thought. His second favorite one was the one that lit a cigarette and stared down it with wide hazel eyes; in his opinion, these two were closely related. 

“There’s a list?” 

“It’s incredible to me that you aren’t aware how many other nations want to climb you like a tree.” 

“I simply refuse to believe I’m the only sex symbol in the Mediterranean to you people. Nobody else? None of the other Arabs? No one from the Maghreb? I mean,  _ Morocco _ —Farah doesn’t do anything for you all? What about the Phoenicians?” 

“Mm, Farah  _ is _ beautiful. As for, what were their names...Tunisia and Algeria...should I be referring to them by their French names? Hard to keep track. I suppose Francis would prefer the names he chose for them, but he picks them so  _ poorly -- _ ” 

Lovino chuckled. 

“Ambroise and Raoul aren’t particularly lyrical names, I suppose. But French is not lyrical as a whole.” 

“No, not at all. Anyway, I don’t know them well enough -- I’m too far away. Gupta is too quiet for me. As for the Phoenicians, Antine covers up about 60% of his face and I can’t make a judgment. I can’t sleep with Corsica  _ on principle,  _ I can’t fuck Adao without causing a diplomatic incident, and Antonio is a mean drunk.” The curiosity as to what the Sardinian looked like under the hair and glasses was eating him alive and had since they first met, but that wasn’t something he wanted to reveal, let alone how… _ interested  _ he was in taller men. 

“I’m no Rudolph Valentino, is all. I’ve got a belly. And I have pock marks on my cheeks. And so much  _ hair… _ ”

_ You underestimate yourself,  _ Gilbert thought, finally satisfying himself with quietly biting Lovino’s neck and wrapping his arms around that same belly. Lovino passed him what remained of the cigarette for Gilbert to finish. 

“And my personality leaves something to be desired.” 

“You don’t have to be nice for people to want to have sex with you.” 

“Right, you of all people should know, hm?” 

“You greatly overestimate the amount of sex I’ve been having with other people, and I have  _ significantly  _ mellowed out in my old age--” 

Lovino snorted, the movement jolting Gilbert’s chin, still resting on Lovino’s shoulder. 

“Gilbert. It’s been years after the Great War and you still can’t stop talking shit about Francis.” 

“Okay, yes, but can you  _ blame me _ ?” 

“No, but it does prove my point, so it’s relevant. Weren’t you two friends?” 

Gil finally let him go and pushed away, just enough for him to look up at the ceiling. 

“We haven’t talked...since...well, you know. Things change. It’s been a long time since I spoke to Antonio, too -- you can understand that, right?” 

Lovino didn’t know how he felt about how the mood had changed, but he did know that the hurt in Gil’s eyes had not diminished since he had seen him at the treaty signing.  _ Do you hold me responsible, too?  _

“But if something were to happen to them, would you feel bad?”

“Of course.” Gilbert paused, then looked back at him with narrower eyes. 

“Why are you asking all of this?” 

Lovino shrugged, trying to ignore how vulnerable he now felt as he sat naked and crosslegged on Gilbert’s bed. 

“I don’t know, I just feel like something’s coming.” 


	2. Fugitive

Serafina was not an unreasonable person. In fact, she found frequently that the way she reacted to things tended towards the more logical, the more just. The  _ problem,  _ she had decided, was that the  _ rest of the world  _ did not react that way. Similarly, at five feet tall she was not short,  _ everyone else  _ she came across was simply freakishly proportioned. 

Were she to have it her way, she would live a quiet, unfettered existence, tend to a sizable garden, read plenty, and quibble with math and physics and write about it (or other subjects) as she pleased afterwards. Everything else -- romance, children, politics, cats -- would be fully optional. 

But as it was, the world was not ready to leave her to her own devices, and so she found herself frequently on the run -- and ready to make that a problem for those involved with bothering her. She packed light: a few pieces of clothing, a pocket watch she had received from her brother many years ago, some soap. Her one concession to packing lightly was a few books that clearly no one had missed. 

Chief among them was a book of translated poetry from an American-born Levantine fellow she’d never heard of prior, but who she had come to greatly admire. If she ever could swallow her pride and learn English -- her Arabic left something to be desired these days as well -- perhaps one day she would read his work out of translation. Without her long hair, she found it easier to move about undetected -- while she still had to be careful, it was incredible what a plain kerchief and a pair of sunglasses could do. There was also the added element of nobody looking twice at a girl like her these days. Aside from someone asking her for directions or the occasional soldier asking her out for a drink and her saying no, she remained mostly unbothered. 

~~

_ Una volta, un re potente e saggio regnava sulla lontana città di Wirani. Lo si temeva per la sua potenza e lo si amava per la sua saggezza. _

__

_ Ma nel cuore della città c'era un pozzo con acqua fresca e cristallina, dal quale tutti gli abitanti venivano a bere, così come il re e la sua corte, perché non c'erano altri. _

__

_ Una notte, mentre tutti dormivano, una strega entrò in città e versò sette gocce di uno strano liquido nel pozzo, dicendo :“Ormai, chiunque berrà di quell'acqua sarà colpito di follia.” _

__

_ L'indomani mattina, tutti gli abitanti, tranne il re e il suo ciambellano, bevvero l'acqua dal pozzo e diventarono pazzi, proprio come l'aveva annunciato la strega. _

__

_ Allora, nei vicoli e nelle piazze del mercato, la gente passò la loro giornata a bisbigliare: “Il re è pazzo. Il nostro re e il suo ciambellano hanno perso la testa. È fuori questione di essere governati da un re squilibrato. Bisogna detronizzarlo.” _

__

_ Quella sera, il re ordinò che riempisse una coppa d'oro nel pozzo. E quando gliela fu portata, bevve abbondantemente e la passò al suo ciambellano, che a sua volta la bevve. _

_ Grande allora fu l'allegria nella lontana città de Wirani, perché il re e il suo ciambellano avevano ritrovato la ragione. _

~~

Like many people who had rocky relationships with having things and then suddenly not having them, Serafina was inclined to stash her valuables around in places where people would not dare to look. It was clear to her now that Lovino had forgotten, or otherwise had not visited in fifty years, some of the little houses she had acquired over the years for shelter during the harvest. Nothing special, just a roof over a head and a bed for a sore back -- and nobody, it seemed, had dared to dismantle anything that visibly belonged to her. Aside from evidence of the occasional squatter (could you blame them? She couldn’t, not with how the gardens and the interiors were looking), they remained mostly untouched. 

Her island had few big trees -- you could thank the Romans for that, the ungrateful bastards -- so she was inclined towards burying valuable things wherever the soil would permit it.  _ Like a stray dog with some bones,  _ she remarked to herself wryly. It was a perfectly fine supplement to the money she made doing the occasional odd jobs -- usually one-off positions, enough that she could make some money and run. 

Fifty years was long for a human, but not all that long for your average shovel -- it remained, more or less unbothered, in the shed next to her home. She found the clump of aster she had planted over her stash and got started. 

The wood the trunk was made of was disintegrating -- just the bottom half remained. She spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning off what could be saved and putting it in her bag for safekeeping. 

_ Gold necklaces. A star ruby ring from a faraway prince who didn’t know what was best for him. Silver pieces. Sadly, that pretty silk dress did not survive.  _

She had a huge collection of some of her old things in her old official residence in Palermo. To her knowledge, it was now used for her ex-husband’s official visits. 

She stopped, then squinted. There, at the bottom of the rotting chest, underneath a bundled old manuscript. She peeled the twine open to get a better look at the three knives; the leather scabbards they had been originally stored in had long since deteriorated. She could still faintly read the inscription:

“ _ Bymarob syllohom alonim ubymysyrthohom _ ,” she murmured, gently tracing the edge of the blade. 

She squeezed the knife in her hand hard. Let it cut her. When it did not begin to heal immediately, she knew this was exactly what she had been looking for. 

_ Mjannyut.  _ Blades forged from a particular meteoric iron. The purer kind, forged in a time when iron was just beginning to be understood in the first place. The Romans had the occasional meteoric sword forged with half meteoric iron, half Earth iron -- those were less damaging for her kind, but still lethal if used correctly. 

Gold was hard to come by these days -- but this? This was priceless. She strapped one to her leg and the other two she stowed in her bag alongside the flintlock pistol. The pistol would be hard to explain if she got stopped or if she accidentally brought it in for appraisal -- the knives older than Christ would be impossible. 

Very well. She’d sell off a necklace or two and be on her way -- with a strategic advantage in tow. Maybe it would be enough that she could avoid doing busy work around the island and making herself more visible. 

She decided to rest for the night in that same farmhouse and bandage the wound on her hand. 

~~

_ Unlike humans, nations gestate on average for about fifty weeks – one poor female nation in antiquity held the record upon being pregnant for four whole years. This is generally considered to be the basis for the myth of Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis, allegedly pregnant for two hundred while wandering the earth, forbidden by a jealous Hera from having her babies. This nation was, allegedly, the mother of Helena and Phaedra (Athens and Sparta).  _

_ ~~ _

It was one of those mornings where she woke up and had to remind herself that the thin coating of blood on her skin was only in her head. A decade had already passed, but waking up outside of a void was still something she was unaccustomed to. 

Many probably understand the feeling of getting dressed up and going to a café in order to feel like nothing was going wrong. Serafina arrived at the espresso bar in Acireale in a clean dress, a washed face, brushed out hair, and a purse full of money from selling her necklaces at the shop of an interested but flabbergasted vintage jeweler. He had either fully believed in the story she gave about how a person could have legitimately gotten their hands on a perfectly preserved gold and garnet necklace from 1810 (with matching gold and garnet earrings, shaped like pomegranates), or he had known exactly who she was and was a fabulous actor. Either way, she owed him the world and she hoped to God Francis would never know that she not only had buried his gaudy wedding gift in the ground, but sold it for quick cash after unearthing it over a century later. 

She took an offhand glance at the three people in the bar after receiving her coffee: one man in an officer’s uniform and a couple having two one-sided conversations. She turned back to her drink and -- 

Wait. That officer. That cluster of beauty marks right under his eye. And the eyes themselves -- a washed out sort of blue. She’d seen him before. 

_ A girl like you shouldn’t be out at night alone,  _ he had said to her as she walked her bicycle along the curb in downtown Siracusa. God forbid he find out what kind of mischief she had stashed in her little picnic basket. She responded as she usually did, with a winning smile and a quickening of pace. 

_ Never fear. I’ve done it before and I will be fine to keep doing so, Signore… _

_ Paolo.  _ Officer _ Paolo. _

__ She downed her espresso and left, doing her best to act like nothing was out of the ordinary. 

He’d already seen her. Was there any point in her even disguising that she was leaving? No; she needed to pretend like nothing was out of the ordinary. She wasn’t someone he knew, and he wasn’t someone  _ she  _ knew. 

She was halfway down the street before taking a look in her bicycle mirror. He was following her at a pace that aspired to be casual but was anything but. Casually, she mounted her bicycle and turned the corner, then another, holding her breath until she heard the sound of his boots trotting in the opposite direction. 

She needed to be more careful. Had he seen her bicycle up close? Surely a black haired, brown-skinned woman on a plain black bicycle with a woven basket was not a dead giveaway? If that was what they were going after, they’d have to stop a third of the population. 

She stopped, finally, looking up to see another poster with her likeness on it. The image was of a younger version of her, resplendent with her long braid, pregnant belly, and downcast eyes. She wore a crown of almond blossoms, as she had on her wedding day: the caption read “Women, Your Battle: Make Beautiful Babies for a Beautiful Future”. She didn’t know whether to laugh or gasp, but she tore it down, stuffed it into her bag, and continued on her journey. 

She got to her hideout and threw the poster in the pile with all of the others. 

Centuries of accomplishments in the field of science, mathematics, architecture, in literature, even on the battlefield, and all anyone could remember her for was her ill-fated marriage and subsequent stillbirth. She would find it funny if it didn’t still hurt her so -- surely  _ someone  _ who remembered something about her would find this all in bad taste?

“I did a trick shot standing on the back of a horse and with my ass resting on a Prussian’s head!” she raged to no one in particular. “As a child, I gave my father a man’s head on a platter! I translated Archimedes’s research into vernacular and studied astronomy in Damascus!” 

She stood surrounded by scraps of paper that advocated for her military state sanctioned fertility cult and sighed. 

“Not like anybody  _ cares  _ about that anymore!” 

~~

_ “If you act like it’s not a problem, it won’t be a problem. Just act like you belong there and nobody will think otherwise.”  _

She had to thank Lovino for that advice back when he had talked about his skill as a thief. She didn’t expect him to have known that one day she might use that against him. 

It was still jarring to hear his voice on the radio -- she had yet to meet a Sicilian who felt comfortable with how easily he used their dialects to tell them about what their duties were as Italians -- and tell them how those dialects were to be discarded in favor of a “proper” Italian from the north, as taught later on the radio. It was rather easy for him, they agreed in the marketplaces, to disavow himself of something that was something he had only ever come to secondhand. 

Would they have liked it better if she fell in line and did that for him instead? The Gorgon herself, coming out of hiding only to renounce the languages she had written sonnets in for hundreds of years? She didn’t know. She hadn’t the courage to come out and ask -- ten years of solitude, it did things to the psyche that she was still only now beginning to understand. 

When was the last time she had truly spoken to anyone? She couldn’t remember -- it was too much to risk her voice being recognized, somehow. She wondered how the others kept a low profile, now that you could see them in movies and hear their voices over the radio. Lovino had always been the one who had blended in among humans better than the others -- but now? She wasn’t so sure. From what she heard, they were locked up in some little tower in Rome for safekeeping. The only one that she heard of making any kind of free travel was Feliciano, and it seemed even  _ he  _ always had a Blackshirt or three around him at any given moment. 

~~

_ Strangely enough, Serafina had not been conscious when Lovino first felt the baby kick. He’d had his hand against her abdomen while she slept and felt a hand (or a foot—hard to tell) press up against his. He pulled her closer with one arm and wiped his eyes on her hair.  _

~~ 

Serafina had rescued a tube radio from the garbage and managed to figure out how to fix it up just enough to get a few signals. It beat being alone in the dark in a house with mice for company. There had been a solid period of time a few years ago where she had been in hiding, listening only to news about the Senussi Order, only leaving the home for food and the occasional voyage for reading material. Simpler times -- second only to when she had sat, unnoticed, in a library while people spoke in hushed tones about Il Duce’s March on Rome, supplementing the commentary from the radio. 

She continued to fiddle with the dial before hitting a frequency that -- 

_ “Hello! This is Gin and Topic.”  _

If it was unsettling to hear Lovino speak, but it was even stranger to notice Antine’s conspicuous absence from public addresses. She couldn’t remember the last time she had heard his voice -- she only ever saw him briefly, close enough to make out the shape of his eyes behind his glasses, but never close enough to touch. Neither had attempted it -- but it had been quite some time since she had seen him last. 

Antine then launched into a long introduction in some Sardinian dialect she didn’t understand. He was speaking in Sardinian -- that wasn’t supposed to be allowed, was it? Was this a private radio channel? Did he just like the sound of his own voice, she wondered, or did he have a following? She thought of all the times she had sat by herself and tried to recite all of  _ La Caristia _ to keep herself occupied on something else, like a lunatic mathematician reciting digits of pi. 

~~

_ “I don’t want to name him—“ _

_ “Or her!” _

_ “Or her, after any of our parents or relatives.”  _

_ “No, it would be too confusing.” And the thought of her naming her baby after the man who had hurt them both so intimately was enough to make her ill.  _

_ She was lying down on a blanket; she was propped up just enough so she could see him over her belly.  _

_ “I like Federico for a boy,” she admitted.  _

_ “Oh, like your old boyfriend?”  _

_ “Tshhh. The only human man I ever liked.” _

_ “I like Pietro.”  _

_ “Not a chance, it’s too common.”  _

_ “That’s the point. I want a normal name, given the fact that mine is absolutely stupid and I hate it.”  _

_ She grabbed his hand and kissed it.  _

_ “What about its original Arabic form, Lutfi? If I give you a boy, can I name him after  _ you?” 

_ He shook his head, hand trailing down from her mouth to rest absently on her stomach. She decided she might be better off changing the subject:  _

_ “What about for a girl?”  _

_ Lovino hesitated before turning back to the apple he was attempting to peel with his free hand.  _

_ “I like Olivia.”  _

_ “I like that too. Olivia Vargas.”  _

_ She got quiet for a moment, looking down at his hand.  _

_ “What about….Elissa?”  _

_ He looked up and met her eyes.  _

_ “Didn’t we say we weren’t going to name any children after relatives?” _

_ “You just said you didn’t mind Federico. How is she any different?”  _

_ He hummed before leaning back against the tree behind him.  _

_ “It’s a beautiful name  _ and  _ it would infuriate your father. What’s not to love?”  _

~~

Most streets in Pedara are poorly lit; mainly because the township received few long-term visitors, so those who decided to stay were usually in positions where they needed to learn the layout by heart. 

Officer Paolo did not need to know the layout of the little town to know that, as a man in a dark uniform, it was not difficult to hide in a shadow. And so he did, knowing this was the only path out of Pedara without a checkpoint and up into the mountain. Odd. It was definitely her, but where was her bicycle? 

She was muttering to herself, counting on her fingers in a language he did not recognize, basket of groceries swinging in the crook of her arm. He waited for his target to slow down just long enough to grab her from behind. 

“Come quietly,” Paolo hissed into her ear, hand covering her mouth. Her teeth covered his fingers in response, her heel covering his toe as a reprisal. 

Time and time again, they just kept thinking it would take a grab of the bicep, a hand on the mouth. You’d think they would have  _ learned  _ by now. She thought of the posters, with her likeness surrounded by flowers. Had it been long enough that they had forgotten how strong she was? Had been? She broke free of his grasp and turned to face him, trying to decide if her own knowledge of Pedara’s streets was enough to save her. 

“What do you  _ want?  _ What? A photo? A handkerchief? A kiss goodbye?”

She knew, but she wanted to hear it from his mouth first. 

“I’ve been sent to fetch you. This madness has gone on long enough. Come back to Rome. I won’t ask again -- it’s been made clear that, ideally, you come with me unharmed and not in handcuffs. I….well, I don’t want to hurt a woman, you understand.” 

_ What do you call stalking me down city street to outskirt cowpath to city street? That doesn’t count to you?  _

“Oh, you’ll have to harm me.” 

“Don’t you want to come home?” 

“I  _ am  _ home. You’re the one trespassing.” 

“I’m an Italian like you -- I have every right to be here, and I quite like it.” 

“Leave me alone and leave this island before I make you.” 

She realized she had little on her to help make her case if he decided to call her bluff. She had been arrogant enough to keep walking around more or less unarmed -- she had expected her wits to save her more than her fists, especially after using her fists seemed to have gotten her into all of this in the first place. When she started to back up and run, she knew he would pursue. It shocked her more that he felt so comfortable doing this on his own -- where was his -- 

An eyeful of stars answered her question when a fist collided with her abdomen. Paolo’s partner was a big man -- his strategy was to be larger than her, and she quickly found that it was an effective strategy if she suffocated under his weight. She summoned a bit more of her strength and kicked him in a soft, undisclosed location, hopping back up on her feet and continuing to run. 

She couldn’t kill a civilian -- not yet, anyway, not with some ancient knives and her bare hands. She scuttled on top of a roof and lay as flat as she could, taking note of the street sign to figure out how far away she was from her bicycle. A tile clattered and she held her breath, knees throbbing -- she was getting far too old for this. 

“Start over there, I’ll go over there. We’ll meet in the middle,” she heard Paolo say to his partner in Romanesco. Could she -- 

She had no choice. It was do or die. She hoped her depth perception had not been lost in the changeover from purgatory as she got up to her feet and charged towards the next rooftop. 

_ If they get me, they’ll destroy me. But they have to get me first _ , she chanted to herself, trying to drown out the shouts of the officers and trying to ignore the people waking up to the noise of her body tumbling onto and across their roofs. 

There, there it was -- if she got to her bicycle and then got to the park, she would be home free. She jumped, feeling her ankles break and un-break, mounted her bike, and escaped into the darkness. The chain on her bicycle broke and she began to run again, stopping only at the mouth of the volcano. Her breaths resembled gulps of water, falling to those same bloody knees that had nearly betrayed her hours prior. She touched her face and realized she was crying, the salt stinging her healing wounds.

She did something she hadn’t done in a long time: she screamed. Howled, the noise coming from a part of her that had gone dormant when she had turned to ash sixty years prior. 

~~

_ It had been about eight months, and Nina looked like she was going to burst. Lovino couldn’t look directly at her without grinning, but that had been true for the last six months. Andria had come to visit -- unusual for him, but he was the first family member she’d seen outside of her husband or brother in quite some time, so she welcomed the fresh face. It was the first time she’d seen  _ him  _ in ages, to say the very least. He got up to give her a hug, bending forward so his much shorter cousin could reach his face and kiss his cheeks.  _

_ “Nina, you’re glowing--”  _

_ She let out a huff, finally sitting down with her cousin and husband.  _

_ “No, I’m really not, but thank you for the compliment.”  _

_ They talked for hours before Andria finally had to excuse himself and rest. Lovino turned to look at her.  _

_ “You wanted five when we first started talking about kids. You want this four more times?”  _

_ “Let’s wait to find out what a little devil we’ve made and we’ll decide then, yeah?”  _

_ “I was a very well behaved child. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  _

~~

It could have been five minutes, or it could have been fifty. All of the noise had left her. Exhausted, she made her way back down the mountain, wondering if she had woken Etna up -- she had always been a notoriously light sleeper. 

She knew what she needed to do and knew she would never be the same for it, but it was a small price to pay. Serafina had always felt like it was her against the world -- she was not used to being right in that regard. 

So off she went, a deathless relic astride a broken, stolen bicycle, always barely missing disaster. 


	3. Translation

Serafina’s approximation that the three of them had been locked up in Rome to be trotted out for ceremonial purposes, like heirloom candlesticks on a Saint’s feast day, was not  _ completely  _ inaccurate. Antine had some plausible deniability and had more movement between Rome and his own territory, but the Vargas brothers were very much under lock and key. Serafina’s absence and Lovino’s cleavage to his “original” territory at the southern half of the peninsula were, of course, not to be publicly addressed, as all was as it should be. 

After a few assassination attempts were uncovered (supposedly), Feli only went anywhere with a security detail and Lovino was normal looking enough that, for the most part, he could do as he pleased but had to check in and out with an officer or two about where he was going. This, obviously, did not sit well with him, so Lovino mostly just stayed in his apartment, exasperated, to let the humans work all of this absurdity out on their own. 

It’s not like he  _ hadn’t  _ tried -- it was more like people were so thrilled that some things were operating well that they had forgotten what was sacrificed, so by drawing attention to the sacrifices, one was perceived as ungrateful for the so-called gains. So his economy was (so he heard) doing well and he felt healthy in a way that he hadn’t in a long time, but also felt light-headed and exhausted from constant unease. 

There was also, of course, the elephant in the room, which was that all of this talk about how Italy had been glorious as the Roman Empire was something that anyone, even  _ Feli,  _ could refute outright if they wanted to.  _ If they wanted to.  _ As much as Feliciano had been treated well by Romulus, it didn’t take much more than a moment of scrutiny to see all of the ways his methods didn’t add up -- the only reason the Empire had survived as long as it had was because it was a time before artillery and a time before such quick communication. Its ending had been slow and painful and was the result of an atrophying sense of identity and stronger, more innovative enemies. But so far, it looked like nobody was brave enough to tell any of them ‘no’, mainly because they had already seen what happened to those who did. 

Lovino pretended that seeing all the new busts being commissioned in his biological father’s smoothened-out likeness didn’t bother him, with middling success. Every time he looked at one of them, with faces full of a passive wonder at the world being created around them, he imagined what it would be like to make a bust of what Romulus had looked like when he had abandoned a young Lovino in the woods somewhere near the Sibyllines.  _ A witless boy like you is of no use to me.  _ He had wandered back to the palace to find that Romulus had moved northwards with Feliciano, leaving him and Sicily behind to fend for themselves. She had wrapped his feet in linen and he had fallen asleep next to her, having cried himself into a state of exhaustion. 

Lovino had objected to how Serafina’s image had been chosen in order to communicate the role of women in the new regime, mainly because she had never had the chance to be a mother and, furthermore, if they were looking to apprehend her, it might be a conflicting message to have her likeness used for exemplary female behavior and also have her likeness hanging on a “WANTED” poster. 

_ You overthink things,  _ the Minister of Communications had said to him, staring at him over his glasses like a nun at an errant schoolboy.  _ It’s not her; it’s an  _ allegory of _ her, in order to elicit a stronger emotional response. In ancient Sparta, a woman dying in childbirth was seen as equivalent to a man dying in combat. You should be honored that they remember her in the first place, and that her sacrifice is memorialized the way it is.  _

Of course, the unspoken sentiment hung very heavily amongst the cabinet:  _ this would all be significantly less awkward if she had stayed dead and if you had been more willing to play along.  _

~~

Serafina had been roaming her island like a tiger in a cage, just ahead of Paolo at each interval. Inexplicably, Paolo had never been reassigned in the two? three? years since his first attempt at capturing her; maybe because deep down, the Cabinet was aware that he would probably have better luck with all of his failures than a new face would. 

Lovino had overheard a story from a private where she had finally been apprehended, finally put in the back of a van, when she said something about her arm hurting from the way she was handcuffed. Not thinking deeply, the private had removed her restraints. She had beaten the four of them into submission and was gone before they could react. 

_ It was like something from the mind of an absurdist,  _ that same private had groaned. A tiny little Sicilian woman with a left hook like Carnera? 

Lovino was surprised that they hadn’t just opened a can of sardines and put it under a propped up laundry basket; it was significantly more sophisticated than whatever  _ they  _ had been up to for the past few years. Not like he wished this existence on her -- that was the only reason he hadn’t tried to give them pointers.  _ Dangle a physicist’s manuscript on a fishing line and slowly reel it into a prison cell. Cook artichokes with garlic in the town hall; she’ll be there in fifteen minutes flat.  _

He still kept the map going of all of her reported appearances -- he would write down when he heard about where she had last been spotted, more or less ignoring whenever the officer who let her get away got a dressing-down; getting onto the Sicilian Repatriation Commission was something that was done almost as a long-form punishment at this point. Sometimes, he and Antine would smoke cigarettes and sit around the map and theorize. Since the two were more or less pinned to Rome, the way they cultivated the map and the way they spoke about it took on a resemblance to bird watching. 

“So she was spotted  _ here… _ ” said Antine, pointing at one pushpin, “in Marsala, two weeks ago, in the morning, where that private tried to get her and failed. But she was spotted  _ here,  _ in Barrafranca, early that afternoon.”

“If she’s going by bicycle, that’s impossible. The terrain is bad enough by car. Most of that you would have to go on foot along the coast, and that would easily be a day’s travel.” 

“She was always athletic.” 

“Yeah, a  _ swimmer,  _ not a champion cyclist or runner _.  _ Even if she’s been biking this whole time, the roads are bad. There’s no way that you could swim that, either. The water’s too rough”

Antine leaned back and took a long drag of his cigarette. 

“Either she’s got the fastest sprint the world has ever seen, or there are two of her.” 

Lovino’s eyes went that specific kind of round that let Antine know that he might have accidentally said something smart. 

“What description did the warrant use again?” 

“A woman aged 25-30, brown skin, amber eyes, curly black hair, on a black bicycle.” 

“And what was Nina wearing when they saw her in Marsala?” 

“A plain, short-sleeved black dress.” 

Lovino was doing that thing where he was rolling his cigarette filter between his thumb and index finger -- didn’t he know that was going to stain his skin?

“We know she’s probably operating on a network of barns or safe-houses. She had plenty of little houses she would stay in for harvest season -- couldn’t tell you where they all are, but I’d guess the ones she’s staying in are around here, here, here, here, and here.” Lovino pointed to Catania, Messina, Marsala, Corleone, and Gela. “There’s that one official residence we shared in Palermo -- that used to be her main residence, along with the ones in the other provinces for official business. And if I were her, I would either avoid them like the plague or stay there exclusively because no one would expect me to be stupid enough to hide there in the first place.” 

Antine had reached a different conclusion: 

“You don’t think she’s got a slew of young Sicilian housewives planting bombs and punching out Blackshirts, do you?” 

The two sat in a meditative silence before Lovino let out a chuckle. 

“How many of these are actually interactions with her, do you think, and how many of these can be attributed to the Commission being almost exclusively people from the north?” 

“The account from Marsala has  _ got  _ to be her. I don’t see how any other person her size would think to take on four officers and live to tell the tale.” 

Lovino got up to open a window and Feliciano left his post at the key-hole. 

~~

_ AG, _

_ Received a worrying note about your health in prison. I apologize, again, for my infrequent correspondence -- it’s rather difficult to get this to you, as I need to go to the other side of Rome to send things as discreetly as possible.  _

_ I read those notes you sent me again, your musings. They will make excellent books when(!!) you finally get out. I miss our conversations. _

_ What can I do to be of assistance? They keep  _ saying  _ that they will get you some proper medical treatment, but I am frankly doubtful. I can try and arrange something, but I am closely watched and fear it will do more harm than good.  _

_ As ever,  _

_ Agnello. _

_ Agnello,  _

_ As always, a welcome surprise to hear from the likes of you. Do what you can and what you will, and nothing more.  _

_ AG. _

Antine Pecora, the all-knowing near-trimillenniarian at a loss for ideas, sat at his desk and pondered that statement. What  _ could  _ he do? What  _ would  _ he do? What of those things overlapped? 

~~

A little yellow book sat on Lovino’s coffee table, just out of reach. He had picked it up on his way back to his apartment from his office -- they circulated by the thousands, especially amongst the younger crowd. 

Lovino was unclear on how to broach this subject to Gilbert, but was going to try nevertheless. If there was anything Lovino disliked more than his feet being sweaty, it was definitely sweaty palms. Right now, they were oppressively damp, to the point where holding the telephone was nearly impossible; he had to hold the speaker with a dishrag. 

“Wasn’t expecting your call, Vin. It’s….nice to hear from you.” 

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Hey, Gil?” 

“Mm?” 

“Are you familiar at all with  _ Il Giallo Mondadori _ ?” 

“That crime publisher, right? The pulp novels with the yellow covers?” 

“Yeah. Um. Something in this week’s edition is written about you.”

There was a pause over the telephone. Lovino could hear a dog barking in the background, then Ludwig’s voice. 

“Real or not real?”

“Very not real, but I don’t know if other people who don’t know you would be aware of that.” 

“Good or bad?” 

“It’s a...well. Is it in circulation in Germany? You should pick one up and read it for yourself.” 

“No, but I called in a favor and have a printing house in Turin send one random copy to my home once a month to practice my Italian.” 

“I can’t imagine it’s all that helpful.” 

“On the contrary -- I can read this material and not get bored, which is more than I can say for Dante or D’Annunzio. But now instead of hell I know a lot of vocabulary about crimes, so...take that and do what you will with it.” 

Lovino laughed, albeit still somewhat nervously. The combination of the subject matter -- both the content of the pulp and Gilbert’s taste in literature -- was not something he felt comfortable talking about so freely. His only saving grace was that perhaps if someone picked up the receiver, it was unlikely they were fluent enough in English to understand what was going on. 

“So what do I do in this little story?” 

“You’re a detective solving a series of murders in Berlin.”

“Nice.” 

“Serafina is the femme fatale.” 

_ The villain of the story is Ivan Braginsky, but that isn’t the surprising part anymore, unfortunately.  _

The speaker spluttered with static as Gilbert choked on his own tongue. 

“ _ WHAT?”  _

“That’s what I’m calling about. There’s a piece of fiction written about you and her--” 

“They….know I know other women far better than her, right? I literally had a very open affair with Erzsi, to name at least one person. They wouldn’t have to dig all that deep.” 

“I know. Which makes me wonder if they….do they….do they know about  _ us _ ?” 

In all of this, Lovino didn’t know what was worse: the humans he interacted with all being aware of his bisexuality, or someone trying to hide his and his not-boyfriend’s bisexuality by attributing their gay relationship to his not-boyfriend falling in love with and having sex with his ex-wife. 

“That’s just not possible,” Lovino concluded. “I think we’ve been pretty discreet all these years. There’s… I don’t know  _ how  _ some unknown author might know that, unless someone who does know is informing them.” 

“Who’s the author?” 

“Let me go get it again. I pick it up because I need something to chase down the news every day -- you aren’t on the cover, at least not yet.” 

“I’m calling in. I’m asking for more of these.”

_ “No--” _

“I want an anthology, leather-bound on rag paper, with all the illustrations and everything. Are there illustrations?” 

Gilbert was met with a girthy two seconds’ worth of silence in response before a deep sigh and:

“I didn’t check.” 

“Call me back with more information, because it is imperative, now, for me to send this person a board-bound and signed copy of his own book.” 

“Not one for you?”

“Doesn’t the old saying go ‘one to use, one to lose’?” 

Gil couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard Lovino laugh. It was a low sound, in the back of his throat, as if he was unsure he was even allowed to do so in the first place. 

“So, Vin, how’s....everything, right now?” 

“Well? Um… “

There was another pause. Lovino wasn’t sure if this line was monitored or not. At this rate, all of the phone booths outside of his apartment within a five kilometer radius had some sort of surveillance on them. 

“Antine is doing well. As is Feliciano, but I’m sure Feliciano has already communicated that to you and your...you know.” 

“Yeah. I’ve been listening to Antine’s little broadcasts. They’re interesting. I didn’t know he was into that sort of thing.” 

“He’s….more friendly when you’re one on one, nearly a completely different person when he’s by himself. He’s not one to do well in groups.” 

“I mean, half of it I don’t understand because it’s in some Sardinian dialect, but the stuff I do is nice. He speaks Italian a lot slower than you do, for one thing.” 

“He started doing it after the Great War -- as a thank you from the king for sharing his knowledge on Sardinian dialects to use as some ciphers, they gave him a fancy radio and some recording equipment. The Italian bit he probably added as a concession to…”  _ Careful, Lovino.  _ “...the times.” 

“I heard that you weren’t supposed to be using those regional languages anymore.” 

“We’re not. I don’t know if Mussolini even knows he has that radio show in the first place, or if he cares. He’s a little focused on...other things.” 

_ Does everyone know about Serafina being in open revolt? Is that something I can talk about on the phone with someone not in Rome without revealing anything too damning about the current state of affairs? Well...to be fair, it would be easier to point to the times where she  _ wasn’t  _ rebelling.  _

Gilbert didn’t need to hear much from Lovino to understand exactly what kind of “things” he was referencing. The rumors had been circulating for quite some time, only exacerbated by her absence from any and all official appearances. 

“How serious?” 

“The things? Well, with regards to what I actually can control...it’s been nearly fifteen years. She’s still not here with us, and I assume that’s by her design.” 

“Interesting. Do you  _ want  _ her there?” 

_ No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no --  _

“Of course, why wouldn’t I?” 

Gilbert cleared his throat. 

“Right. I can only imagine how much more wonderful your life in Rome is in comparison to…”  _ Careful, Gil.  _ “...elsewhere.” 

“Yes.” 

“At any rate, thank you for your concern. I’ll call the publishing house, ask for some more information, and I hope to hear back from you about the….rest of it.” 

“By all means. I’ll give it another read through and give you a blow-by-blow, assuming you don’t buy up every copy of it on your side of the Alps.” 

“I have a great deal of money and very little to do these days. You can count on it.” 

“Take care, Gil.”  _ For the love of God, be safe and be careful.  _

“Talk to you later, Vin. Goodbye.” 

Gilbert hung up the phone and looked around -- Ludwig had gotten home while they had been talking and based on how he had spoken to Aster, there was something...off. But things were rarely  _ not  _ off, so he shouldn’t keep being surprised. Ludwig finally came into the kitchen and sat down. Gil thought he’d break the tension: 

“Have you eaten?”

There was a silence coming off of Ludwig that Gilbert did not like but had come accustomed to. 

_ What has happened to you?  _ He knew the answer, but he didn’t dare say it aloud. 

“You’re thinking about something.” 

“I  _ know _ , you know.”

There was...lots that could be referencing! The affairs? His feelings about their current situation? Roderich, the not-so-crypto-Jew? Or was it the abundance of crypto-Muslims in Gilbert’s (former, regrettably...he preferred the term ‘historic’ these days) social circle? The...well, in case Ludwig had also gotten the ability to read minds, he ought to hold his peace and act natural. 

“Pardon?” 

“I know you’re the one who set the Reichstag on fire.” 

Gilbert snorted, shifting on his feet. 

“That was  _ years _ ago. Why do you care if I did?” 

“Because they say that whoever did it was a communist.” 

“Wasn’t it a Dutchman? Didn’t they close the investigation after his confession?” 

“Then he lied to protect your reputation. The confession doesn’t prove anything. It wouldn’t be the first time one of our kind has taken political matters into their own hands -- what about when Lovino Vargas assassinated Pellegrino Rossi? Or when Francis was in the mob when they stormed the Bastille?” 

“So what? Are….is this you asking me if I’m a member of the Dutch Communist Party?” 

“ _ I’m not stupid,  _ answer me: do you support the Party?” 

It had not been his greatest stroke of tactical genius. Having missed most of the early warning signs due to a two-pronged devil’s fork of chronic pain and recovering from his exacerbated abandonment issues, what he believed would have been a coup de force that would enlighten everyone and resolve everything actually made everything abundantly worse. He was awfully good at that this century. As a result, he decided to take a third, more mature option:    
“Lud, in case you’ve forgotten, we’re  _ supposed _ to be apolitical -- we can’t even vote in the first place. Our job is to work in the interests of and best represent our people and of our government, whoever that may be. It’s an incredibly hard job -- and sometimes, our own backgrounds and beliefs get in the way of being objective.”

“And yet you mocked Hitler when he was sent to prison.”

“ _ Because he tried to stage an insurrection and failed _ ! Which everyone seems to have conveniently forgotten!” 

“So you admit that you  _ do  _ have a political affiliation, then! So I was right, you  _ are  _ against the party! 

“There is no way to be involved in a society without, either by action or inaction, picking a side. The issue becomes when someone like us openly gets ourselves involved in the political decision-making process. These rules are in place specifically so no society ends up with a deathless, all-knowing ruler in one of us -- remember what I told you, about how people like us in the past were considered to be gods, and what became of them and their societies as a result?”

“You’re a hypocrite.”

“You of all people should know better than to look down on those who do get invested -- look at what they’ve done to  _ you _ ! ” 

“All you ever talk about is how I’m supposed to meet your standards, the government’s standards, the people’s standards, and yet if you did this then you  _ openly defy the will of the people--” _

“You aren’t  _ supposed  _ to live up to my standards. You are supposed to  _ exceed  _ them, do you understand? Ludwig...I have done everything I can to make it clear to you that you should not follow in my footsteps. And I’m telling you this because thinking and acting this way as a younger nation bought me the seat waiting for me in hell. And I don’t want that for  _ you,  _ and I do not want that for the thousands and thousands of people who will have to live with it!” 

Gilbert realized he had been speaking loud enough that all four dogs had woken up and were standing at attention in front of their beds. 

“At ease,” he said gently, and they each curled back up and resumed their rest. 

“How can I be more than you without getting involved? How can I exceed you when I have nothing to show for who you were? Our wealth is stolen. Our land is gone. We are besieged in every conceivable way. I want to deliver us from a fate where we and our people die in shame, and you say that I’m  _ wrong  _ for wanting to do so? They have forgotten who we were. They have  _ taken that from you _ , from  _ us,  _ and I just need you to remember who you were before the war!” 

“Lud, I remember very well, and I don’t know how many times I need to tell you that fighting with small states for scraps is not the surefire path to glory that you think it is.  _ Especially  _ when all of this is being done at the expense of some of the most vulnerable people imaginable.” 

Ludwig shook his head and got up from the table, stretching as he walked. 

“I feel like you should stop telling me what I should think and what I should do if you’re just going to talk about how you’ve only ever had bad ideas.” 

If Gilbert had been feeling more energetic and if Ludwig was still smaller than him, he may have made Ludwig come back and look at him while he was talking to him. If he had gotten angry enough, he may have even taken off his belt. But instead Gilbert sat in silence and started thinking about how all of this seemed to have gone downhill so quickly since that stupid  _ putsch.  _

~~

Serafina had made her way to the apartment in Palermo, scooting in across the roof and in through the window in a swift motion. Out of force of habit and in order to not alert the downstairs neighbors of a break-in, she moved as quietly as possible towards her workspace. The lamplight from the living room cast a gentle glow across the old wall hangings; she caught a glimpse of the old photograph of her and the others involved with the Roman Republic and sighed. She longed for the simplicity of Simone Capra’s disdain. 

_ Wait. I didn’t leave on any lights.  _

She whirled around and came eye to eye with Feliciano. His smile was just as she had remembered it, but it did not connect with his eyes. 

“Hey.” 


	4. Escalation

“How did you...what are you doing here?” 

Feliciano laughed, scuffing his boot on the aged rug underneath their feet. Serafina tried to figure out what other windows there were that she could escape through, before realizing that, like his brother, Feliciano was much stronger than he looked and probably had the speed to match it. 

“I could ask you the same question, Italy’s Most Wanted.  _ I’m  _ here on official business.” 

“I assume you’re here to take me back to Rome?” 

“No. While I’d love to do nothing more, I’m doing no such thing. Just delivering a message. A little bird told me you’d likely be here.” 

“Am…”

“Paolo doesn’t know I’m here, nor have I told him about my information source. He knows you too well, so of course it doesn’t make sense for them to include him in the investigation, but he’s been  _ very  _ interested in your little…” He looked at the long-outdated insignia on her lapel. “...pin project.” 

“No. There’s no way.” 

“You think I wouldn’t know the sympathies of my own  _ brother _ ? Who do you think was by his side all these years while you were gone? Lovino’s Fascist to the bone-marrow.” 

“You’re a terrible messenger, unless this preamble is a part of the message.” 

“You’re right. Excuse me. I came here to tell you that the goal here, for them, is not to arrest you. The goal is that you come alive and come peacefully.” 

“Well, that’s obviously not going to happen--” 

“I’m not finished.” 

The look on Feliciano’s face was enough for the sentence to die in her throat. 

“Il Duce has only ever been good to you people. He admires you, loves you for your resilience and for your uniqueness. I mean, look at what he has done for you, and what he’s done for the south as a whole! Look at how the Mafia has retreated to the hills because of him!” 

_ All that’s happened is that the people who had no other choice but to assist the families are in jail. They’ll be back at it the moment their prison sentences expire, given that all industry is still in the north. Just the way you like it.  _

“I’m here to talk to you because you’ve put him in a  _ very _ desperate spot. There’s a plan to draw you out on the table where the main water supply in the city will be poisoned. The idea is that if enough people get sick and die, you will fall ill as well and come looking for an antidote. They plan to go forward with it if you aren’t back in Rome by the end of the year.” 

“So...sacrifice an entire city’s population just to get me to submit to him?” 

“You mean that much to him.” 

“If I mean that much to him, why isn’t he here to tell me so?” 

“He doesn’t know I’m here. I’ve come to warn you of my own accord. Fascist or not, if someone was planning on doing that to Venice, I’d like to know ahead of time, personally.” 

There were many things she would have liked to say to him, but she decided to take a third option:

“Thank you for the information. Please see yourself out. If the building is surrounded, they should know better.” 

“Yes, Serafina. I hope to see you again soon.” 

“Out.” 

~~ 

_ AG,  _

_ I have arranged for you to be transferred to a clinic in Rome. I hope it is enough and I hope to see you soon, if at all possible. _

_ Be well,  _

_ Agnello.  _

~~

Lovino’s notion of Serafina’s network of Sicilian housewives wasn’t wrong, per se. Serafina decided to steal out of her compromised hideout and meet with two of her connections in Palermo. 

“He’s lying,” said Chiara, incredulous. “I refuse to believe they’d be that evil.” 

“You clearly haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on in Rome.” 

“But if we’re so indispensable, why….it just doesn’t make any sense.” 

“We can probably  _ assume  _ he’s lying, that’s not what I’m asking about. What I’m asking about is whether or not it’s safe for me to continue these actions and continue its association with me ...openly. You understand?” 

“That didn’t stop you from associating with the Carbonari back in the day, or with the  _ soldini,  _ or with the--.” 

Serafina began to laugh, keeping Chiara from listing every movement she’d ever been a part of. 

“You have a point. But no occupiers were threatening to poison my city back then.” 

Maria, quiet until then, decided to add her two cents: 

“This is stupid. We should just secede.” 

“Trust me, I agree. But if it’s not the Italians, it’s the French or the Spanish, or even the English -- what with my brother right next door, they could easily make a satellite of us.” 

“That might have been true before, but  _ now _ ? We can manage ourselves, what with you back and everything.” 

“What, you think we can just establish a republic? Are you crazy? Have you been paying attention to what’s going on in Spain right now? We’re a matter of minutes from the mainland, do you want to _guarantee_ more Blackshirts on Sicilian soil? That’s how.”

“What do you want to do?” 

“I think…” She slumped back in her chair, squinting off into a third space that neither women were privy to. 

“Chiara, you said your uncle ran a metal refinery?”

“Yeah, why?” 

“I can’t say here. Maria, any ideas as to how I might...convincingly change my appearance?” 

Maria grinned. 

“Oh,  _ plenty. _ ”

“Meet me out at Sant’Erasmo tomorrow night, same time.” 

The two got up and left her to stare down at the chain around her neck, with the  _ corno  _ Lovino had given her as an engagement present. The coral had grown dull with age. 

_ A Fascist to the bone-marrow… _

~~

Speaking of the Spanish…

Yes, the world as he knew it was changing faster than he could keep up with it, but the telephone was great at making him forget for a good fifteen minutes. 

“Roderich, you understand when I say that you  _ can’t  _ marry that German?” 

“You understand that I have very little choice in the matter?”

He thought of the gun he had propped up against the door and about the man in the Canary Islands intent on making Spain his own to ruin. 

“You always have a choice. You can always say no. Slip out the window, cut off your hair --”

“And what? I’ll starve, or I’ll freeze to death, assuming they don’t find me first.” 

“Gil won’t help you?”

“You haven’t heard? He’s gone missing himself. They sent him out to the Rhineland to assist with the remilitarization and he vanished. They think he might have been kidnapped or worse.” 

“What, by communists?”

“That’s what they’re saying.”

“Do you believe them?”

Roderich breathed slowly through his nose. There was something he wasn’t saying, but Antonio knew well enough how to read between the gaps. 

“That’s not my place to say.” 

~~

Antonio Gramsci was very ill, and Antine had made it his policy to abuse his ambulatory privilege to go visit him once a week. The prosecutor in Gramsci’s case had emphasized that sending him to prison was mandatory, as “it was necessary to make his brain rot” -- Antine had read the health reports. They had done far worse to him. 

“I’m going to die here, aren’t I?” 

“What answer will make you rest easier?” 

“The truthful one.” 

“Yes. You probably will. You’re pretty damn sick.” 

The scholar-turned-politician-turned-political-prisoner breathed deeply. 

“I want to ask something of you.”

“Anything.”

“I'll never see my home again…” He paused again, searching for a way to communicate the unfathomable. “I will never set foot on my island again. May I...at least...look upon your face, before I pass?” 

Antine touched his hand and removed his dark glasses, pushing them up onto his forehead. 

The Sardinian man nodded solemnly. The Sardinian nation kept from shedding his enraged, futile tears until he was long out of the man’s hospital room. 

~~

Franco had not yet secured Madrid, and by Antonio’s approximation that was about 5% his doing. Another 5%, easily, had to be Laura Havemeyer, who’d been unfortunate enough to get caught up in all of this but who loved him enough to stay by his side regardless. The two were sharing a cigarette and sitting on top of a pile of rubble. 

“Maybe this isn’t so hopeless after all,” he conceded. 

“The Popular Front  _ won  _ the election. I don’t understand why you’re so surprised this is happening in response.” 

“Call me a cynic, but I don’t expect anyone to pick the side I’m fighting for.” 

Laura stifled a snort. 

“Yes, history’s greatest underdog….Spain.” 

He shot her a look through the cigarette smoke --  _ look at the pot calling the kettle black  _ \-- and exhaled before taking note of the blond man walking toward them. 

“ _ Alfred? _ ” 

The American got on his knees in front of them -- he looked...different, but Antonio wasn’t sure how much of that was just because he hadn’t seen much at all of him since at least the turn of the century. 

“ _ Buenas tardes _ ,  _ estoy --” _

“The ceceo is for the c and z, not the s.” 

“I’m trying, God damn it. How are you?”

“Bad, but getting better.” 

Alfred checked his inexplicably unbroken pocketwatch -- Antonio tried to peek and see who the photograph inside of it was, but the American was too quick for him. 

“There’s going to be another broadcast soon -- we should look for someone who has a radio.” 

“Broadcast?” 

“You don’t know? There’s a  _ mole  _ on the Italian side. He’s definitely high up on the command chain and might be a communist -- don’t really care, but he started broadcasting intel a few months ago.” He craned his head to see if any of the circles were the source of the faint music being played. “Over there. Follow me.” 

A motley crew they were, a Spaniard, an American, and a Belgian woman crouched around the portable radio that one volunteer had thoughtfully provided.

“Are you sure this is the right station?”

“Shh!” 

The three sat in silence, listening to a man speak in Italian over the radio. Antonio and Laura both squinted, trying to place the voice.  _ Lovino?  _

“Yeah, this is it.” 

“What’s he  _ saying _ ?” 

“Wait for the music to play,” explained the volunteer. “If there’s folk music, there’s news. If it’s American music, there’s nothing. Everything else is just filler.” 

When the Sardinian folk song started playing, the Catalonian volunteer immediately turned the knob, rendering the music once more into mere noise. 

“What are you doing?!”

“The important stuff is on the other channel, the music’s the signal to flip over.” 

Static, and then a garbled greeting in an accented Catalan that Antonio was unable to forget even if he wanted to: 

“ _ Good evening, comrades. Grab your pens and paper, as I will not be re-broadcasting this information today. _ ”

Laura choked on the water she was drinking. 

“Antine?!?? _ ” _

“Who’s that?”

_ Sardinia? My older half-brother by my mother that I never really knew? The guy who stabbed me? Rounded up Italy into a republic? Beat up France? Beat up Aragon?”  _

“Uh, Sardinia. Big, dark glasses, crazy hair? Really tall?” 

Nothing. 

“You know Corsica?”

_ “I’ll be repeating this message in Catalan, then in the typical Logudorese. I expect those who speak these languages in the crowds -- I know you’re there -- to translate and relay this to others. International Brigade members, this is a reminder that…” _

“Sort of. Big sailor fella, murder eyes?” Antonio stifled a laugh in spite of himself. 

“He has a twin brother.” 

“Ah. Identical?” 

“No.”

Laura’s head whipped around to glare at both of them. 

“Will you  _ shut up,  _ I’m trying to listen!” 

“ _....Italian reinforcements will be sent in November. Operation Peacock -- the plan to recover Sicily and to root out partisans on the island -- has been put on hold in order to concentrate on this effort, which means a good deal to those of us over here, but will mean more work for those of us in Spain. Not much else to report. Keep up the good fight; we can win this, providing that people stay informed, stay alive, and stay dedicated. Signing off.”  _

Antonio sat with his fingers steepled in front of his face, resting his chin on his thumbs. 

“One month.” 

“One month until what?” 

Antonio realized that while Alfred had relative command over Spanish, he did not have the many centuries of practice with all of its offshoots. 

“The informant said that Mussolini will be sending more people and they will arrive in one month’s time.” 

“Is this Antine fella to be trusted?” 

Antonio thought about how Antine’s breath had smelled when his knife had sunk into the soft spot beneath his ribcage nearly a century prior. Antonio then thought of Lovino’s face right as Antonio’s bullet had pierced  _ him.  _

“Today? Yes.” 

~~

Gianluca Nicotera was having a normal day until his niece arrived with two new friends in tow. One was someone he had seen around before, but had never gotten to know. The other was a man he had  _ certainly  _ never seen before and who filled him with an unease he couldn’t rationalize. 

The stranger was rather short, with broad shoulders and muscular arms. He wore a  _ coppola  _ that shaded his eyes; based on the grime on his face and coveralls, Gianluca assumed he was working in either a mechanic shop or in construction. 

“This gentleman has a commission for you.” 

He reached into a pocket and pulled out two  _ very  _ worn out knives. 

“I need you to make bullets out of this.” 

Something in the man’s voice didn’t feel right. Gianluca decided to continue being a professional, lest he upset a  _ capo  _ one way or another. He’d never even  _ seen  _ a dagger like this before -- the carving along the blade with the ancient letters made him wonder if he should alert a museum that some of their collection may have been compromised. 

“Iron like this, by itself, isn’t suitable for bullets.”

“Can you cut it with lead to make it more workable?”

“What I  _ could  _ do is melt these down, turn this iron into steel, and it would be perfectly workable then. Why, does it matter if I use other iron in the process?” 

“That’s...personal.” 

Gianluca Nicotera finally got a good look at the stranger’s eyes and remembered every story his grandmother had ever told him about the Gorgon that was tasked with protecting the island and her people. 

“So it  _ is  _ true.” 

Serafina tipped the brim of her cap back and gave him a big grin. Gianluca glanced over at his niece. 

“What kind of trouble have you gotten yourself into, Chiara?” 

“Good trouble,” Serafina affirmed. Gianluca looked back at her. 

“Do you have a gun for those bullets? I’m not going to get many out of these two knives.” 

“I only need a few. It’s important that the amount of metal used in making them remains mostly from those knives.” She handed him the revolver she had started carrying with her -- ivory handled, to match the flintlock. “This is the gun that is supposed to fire them.” 

Gianluca nodded. 

“I can get that back to you by the end of the day.” 

“Wonderful.” 

~~

_ Negras tormentas agitan los aires _

_ nubes oscuras nos impiden ver. _

_ Aunque nos espere el dolor y la muerte _

_ contra el enemigo nos llama el deber. _

Antonio was a man who liked to handle his business discreetly and privately, and was not one to call for help even if he needed it. Aware of his devotion to his pride, many had shown up unannounced. Alfred was, shockingly, still in the fight; Antonio had heard his half-brother had joined up with some English volunteers and was helping with the blockade, directly disobeying the French government’s direct order that he and Francis not get directly involved. 

Francis sent him a note that let him know that, should all else fail, he was prepared to pull some strings at the border and let as many refugees through as he possibly could. Antonio thanked him. 

_ El bien más preciado es la libertad _

_ hay que defenderla con fe y valor. _

Antonio had only run into Caoimhean by sheer dumb luck after ducking behind the same wall as him. 

“Fancy meeting you here,” he’d said with a grin, wiping the sweat out of his eyes. 

“Lovely day for a street fight, isn’t it?” Insurrections made him short of breath -- these past few months it was all Antonio could do to keep a smile up and not get dizzy from lack of oxygen. 

“Listen, last time I came to visit Madrid I feel like it was  _ very  _ different. Do you feel like anything has changed?” 

Antonio chuckled as much as his lungs would allow, coughing in the process. 

“I’ll treat you to a pristine bistro coffee at the end of this. Okay?” 

“You’re on.” 

“I’ve got to get back to the Telefoníca building. You coming?” 

“Of course. I was headed there too when I got lost. Lead the way.” 

So they ran, stepping over the corpses of poets on their way to safety. 

_ Alza la bandera revolucionaria _

_ que del triunfo sin cesar nos lleva en pos. _

_ Alza la bandera revolucionaria _

_ que del triunfo sin cesar nos lleva en pos. _

Antonio carried exactly three personal effects with him: a little bound notebook he’d lashed together of Roderich’s letters to him, a set of amber  _ misbaha  _ that had been given to him by Al-Andalus -- he’d hidden their true purpose all these years by affixing a gold crucifix on top of the phalanges -- and a sheaf of stationery and a pen he had found in a bombed-out paper shop. 

He put the third to great use -- he only had about two pages of it left. He uncapped the pen and used the barrel of his rifle as a flat surface: 

_ Roderich,  _

_ You asked me the last time I called you why I was taking all this time to talk to you. Why not call my brother, or call Francis, or use my time to call others to ask for help.  _

_ I think you know why.  _

_ I love you. I have not stopped loving you. You call me and tell me that you’re going to be forced to marry someone you do not love, someone who, if they found out who you really were, it may well be the death of you. You joke about how Ivan reacted when he overheard you speaking Yiddish to yourself, and how maybe you’ll go east if all else fails. I am sure you are aware of the danger you are in, but I do not understand why you are resigned to it. There is always hope, there is always a way out. Ugly as it may be, there is  _ _ always _ _ a way. I won’t let them bury you, not if I can do anything about it, however small it may be.  _

_ If all else fails, Francis has said he’s going to open up the border for refugees. Come meet me in Avignon. You know damn well where, and if our people forsake us then at least we will have each other for company while we finally grow old together.  _

_ This is my last bit of paper, so I can’t write to you for a while. Let me know, whenever you’re able.  _

He capped the pen and wiped his face, taking a moment to say his standard prayer that none of the censors could crack their shorthand. All this paper he had and each time he wrote he’d been wanting for an envelope.

“Hey, Laura? Do you have any envelopes left?”

_ En pie el pueblo obrero, a la batalla _

_ hay que derrocar a la reacción. _

The good news was that Antonio’s breathing was starting to go back to normal. The bad news was that had everything to do with the waning morale of the Republic, and the increased lung capacity meant nothing after having spent a winter without heat and while he hadn’t eaten anything in five days. 

Alfred had been summoned back to Washington for some convoluted reason that was only further obfuscated by their slight language barrier. Caoimhean had gotten hit by a falling chunk of an old apartment complex and had to return to Ireland to heal. 

He knew Ludwig and Feliciano were on the continent, circling the gates,and were cursing him with every bullet he fired -- he had yet to see Lovino.  _ Wouldn’t it be funny if he finally got his revenge and got that bullet into my heart now, a hundred years later?  _

From what he understood from the broadcasts, Feliciano was the one who was to supervise military decisions -- he was constantly being moved between Italy, Spain, and the colonies.  _ Where is your brother?  _

“Antonio, there’s someone here to see you.” 

“Not now.”

“No, you  _ really _ should come here.” 

Groaning as he got up from his cross legged position, Antonio shuffled over to where Laura was standing to see -- 

No. 

“Gil?” 

Gilbert Bielschmidt looked...awful. But Antonio also knew that Gilbert looked his worst when he performed his best. They had that in common...at least, Antonio liked to think so.

“What can I do?”

Without thinking, Antonio grabbed him and pulled him into an embrace. 

“Gil, they were saying you  _ died. _ ” 

“Easier to say than ‘Prussia took an assignment in the Rhineland and escaped into France,’ isn’t it?” 

Antonio ushered Gil into the tiny corner they had jokingly dubbed his “throne room”. 

“Is that really how you got out?” 

“As you may have noticed, my brother and his… “ Accomplice? Boyfriend? Mentor? He had heard Ludwig on the radio state emphatically that Feliciano had taught him everything he knew. He would resent it if Feliciano had any good ideas. 

“Yeah.”

“They’re here as well. They’re too busy with all this to care about an old contrarian like me...not for the moment, anyway.” 

_ ¡A las barricadas! ¡A las barricadas! _

_ por el triunfo de la Confederación. _

_ ¡A las barricadas! ¡A las barricadas! _

_ por el triunfo de la Confederación. _

They sat around the radio and listened to the news about Guernica -- Antonio was still having trouble breathing, but now he understood why he had begun to cough up blood. 

“Are you okay?” 

“No. What about Xuxa, wasn’t she stationed there?” 

“She got caught in the first round of blasts, from what I understand.”

“Is she going to be alright?”

The foreign volunteer next to him gave a wry smile. 

“Look at you, Spaniard, caring about Basque herself. That’s a development.” 

Antonio didn’t know any phrase in English that sat emotionally between  _ I know what it’s like and don’t wish it on her, even if we have our differences  _ and  _ fuck you, you condescending asshole,  _ so he stayed silent. 

~~

Antonio Gramsci was dead. Out of respect for his family’s privacy, Antine had not attended the burial, but did stop by whenever he found himself near the cemetery to pay his respects. 

Today was one such day -- if he felt inclined enough, sometimes he would write something he had seen in a book or thought about and left it, neatly folded, for whenever his ghost got the chance to get some reading in. 

Antine slowed down the moment he saw Feliciano resting up against the wall near the apartment building’s door. 

“You know, I never struck you as the sentimental type.” 

“I’m sorry?”

“Placing flowers on someone’s grave. Let alone a traitor’s.” 

Antine fought the urge to gulp and breathed out his nose, giving a diplomatic smile and keeping his tone as even as possible: 

“As Sardinia, it is my job to grieve the loss of any of my people. I ache when I lose those precious to me, just as you do with your people. He was one of ours.” 

“He was a seditious and dangerous individual who planned to betray us to the Bolsheviks.”

The tone in Antine’s voice remained gentle, but it was not friendly. 

“Shut up, Feli.” 

“And he deserved every bit of what happened to him.”

Silence. 

“Maybe his wife will learn to keep better company in his absence--” 

Feliciano found himself lifted off the ground, the back of his head throbbing from colliding with brick. Antine’s face was inches from his -- Feliciano saw himself reflected in his glasses: dancing eyes and a serene, unbothered smile. Like his new lord and master, he didn’t enjoy that the Sardinian was several inches taller than him -- it also meant that he hovered inches above the ground so long as Antine decided to hold him there by his lapels. 

“So just another citizen, right?” 

“You forget yourself and where you came from, Venetian.” 

“Hardly. Just thought to give you a friendly little reminder.” 

“Don’t you have better things to do? What about Spain? Eritrea?”  _ Don’t you have other people to harass? _

“I’m sent back to Madrid tomorrow. Was just...worried about your mental state, is all. Thought I should check up on you.” 

Antine finally lowered the mainlander to the ground. He straightened his lapels and Antine went back to unlocking the door. 

“Mind your own damn business.” 

“Someone has to keep you in check. Lord knows nobody else will -- just don’t forget that the rules apply to us too.” 

Antine was struggling to hide how his hands were shaking as Feliciano left. 

“Oh, and I love your little radio show. Too Sardinian, though -- try sticking to the standards, or you’ll get pulled off air!”

~~

The shortness of breath was back. Antonio had to give up cigarettes because it felt like he had an anvil sitting on his chest at all times, so when he finally came across Cyprus once more he had nothing to offer him but a weak smile and a grimy handshake. 

“Evening, Englishman!  _ Someone _ still seems to be missing!” 

“Arthur can’t show his face and said something about how we were closer by.”

“You’re on the opposite end of the continent and he’s a boat ride away, and loves those.”  _ Presuming that he’s not sitting next to Adão as we speak, but that’s another story.  _

Spiro shrugged. He didn’t feel the need to state the obvious. 

“Well, you have me. What can I do?” 

“Spiro, go help Laura tend to the wounded. Someone go relieve Caoimhean from the watch.” 

Caoimhean, back for more punishment, was in no business to be watching  _ anything... _ some shrapnel had gotten him in the eye two days prior and he was still missing it, his red hair sticking out of the bandages in a way that made him look like a wild, horrible beast. 

“Oh! I’ve been meaning to say that I got a telegram, Antonio. Sadik sends well wishes.”

“Oh, get fucked.” 

Caoimhean burst out laughing. 

“I’ll tell him!” 

“By all means.” 

Gil, watching the two from over at the medical tent, rolled his eyes while organizing gauze. 

“They’re more alike than I think they’ll ever realize.”

Laura looked up from her patient with a faint smile. 

“Oh, I think they know well by now. Why do you think he and Sadik hate each other so much?” 

Spiro glanced over at the two of them before giving a pointed look at Laura. 

“I’ve been meaning to ask, Laura...are you two…?”

She shook her head. 

“No. But I was visiting him when all of  _ this… _ ” She gestured vaguely around at the dust and destruction surrounding them. “...really started, and I decided it was a good idea to stay and help. I remember what it felt like to be left to your own devices during a crisis, and didn’t want to see anyone else go through it, not if I could help it.” 

“I know the feeling.”


	5. Surrogate

There’s a cathedral near the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia called the Church of the Divine Savior. Feliks, being past the point of having earned his high opinion of himself, believed he was up to the task that such a meeting place implied. He arrived right on schedule -- it was unusual for him to be early for anything, but life, as of late, required quick and definitive responses. And a task like this required immediate action. 

Stefan was about five minutes late. He was holding Hana in both of his arms; the baby was fast asleep. She looked like your average two year old, with big cheeks and grasping hands balled up around a small teddy bear. Her brown hair was long enough that it reached the shoulders of her tiny wool coat. 

“They took the Sudetenland, and Anja with it as collateral -- it’s only a matter of time before they come for me and come for Hana. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors?”

Feliks nodded.

“They can do whatever they want with me, but I can’t let them have her. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’ll come for her the moment I feel it’s safe.” 

“Of course. If all goes well, it might not be long at all. Nothing but a long weekend with her uncle.”

_ If all goes well.  _

Stefan gave his daughter a few last kisses before handing her off to Feliks. 

“Papa loves you, Mama loves you, Uncle Feliks will take good care of you for now.” Feliks didn’t know how Hana was going to react once she woke up in her uncle’s arms, her mother and father far out of sight. Maybe it was a good thing that she was such a heavy sleeper. 

“God be with you, Stefan.” 

“You as well.” 

Stefan left his wife’s territory without his baby and returned to the capitol to an empty home. He smoked a cigarette on the same balcony he had sat on when Hana was born, thinking of how profoundly the world could change in just the span of a generation. It was all he could do just to keep up with it as best he could. 

~~

Xuxa Montoya Zubiri had escaped Basque Country and was in Spain -- she was also more than ready to make that Antonio’s problem. Most Europeans knew more than well enough what she looked like, even from a distance -- her close-cropped black hair and tall stature gave her away somewhat from afar, but her eyes -- and the old scar that slit her right eye and eyebrow -- were undeniable up close. 

Gilbert had never heard her speak before, let alone seen her up close. 

“What is your brilliant plan, Commander, when Il Generalissimo finally takes Madrid? How many more people have to die?” 

“Xuxa, you’re going to reopen your wounds if you keep shouting like that.” 

“I’ll stop shouting when you answer my question!” 

“He can’t answer if you don’t stop talking,” Gilbert piped up. Xuxa turned to him to let him know that his offering was not welcome: 

“Shut up,  _ Prussian _ .” 

Then turned back to Antonio. 

“My territory is absolutely  _ crawling  _ with Falangists, and I’m getting weaker by the minute. It feels like I have lice.” 

“I’m trying to figure someth -- you’re bleeding. Spiro, can you change the dressing on her wound?”

“Yes.” 

Xuxa, muttering quietly enough that only she could understand but loud enough that God could hear her, went to receive some medical attention from a sympathetic and significantly smaller crew of volunteers. 

Gilbert looked down at the map in front of Antonio -- every territory that had fallen was crossed out with an X. 

“Gil, it’s hopeless. Xuxa is right. They have more money, they have planes and better bombs, and no amount of  _ Comintern _ \- trained recruits and good will is going to outweigh that. People are hungry, sick. I’m just trying to buy people time to...to get out.” 

“What about you?” 

“Me? I...well, they can’t hurt me in any way that matters. And it’s time I learned what this felt like in the first place, isn’t it?” 

“Self-flagellation isn’t a good look on you, you know.” 

“What else am I supposed to do, Gil? It’s  _ true.  _ We’re all going to get ours -- it’s just a matter of time, and it’s long overdue. You said so yourself the other day.” 

Gilbert shook his head gently, looking away. 

“When all this is over, I wonder what Europe will look like.” 

“You will either cease to exist or everyone else will.” 

“Jesus, Antonio, can you lighten the hell up?” 

“I’m sorry, let me look at all the  _ other  _ things there are to be cheerful about!” 

Antonio closed his eyes and cleared his throat. The shortness of breath was creeping in again -- if he was lucky, maybe the oxygen deprivation would take him out before he had to accept Franco’s ascendance. 

“Gil, I need you to go.”

“Go where?”

“Figure out a way to get everyone who needs to get out of Madrid to safety. I’ll hold them off -- they want  _ me  _ more than anyone else.” 

“You don’t think Xuxa would help with something like that, do you? We could try to make a passage over the Pyrenees.” 

“I can talk to her. She made it down here in the first place -- I don’t see why she couldn’t shepherd some of those willing out.” 

He took the pen out of his pocket and tried to draw a path around the Xes on the map. 

“On a good day, it takes easily eight hours to get from here to the border. You need to go right away if you want to make it. Radio said they’ll start marching on Madrid in a matter of days.” 

“Is there anything you want me to take?” 

“Deliver this --” he handed Gilbert an envelope. Gilbert didn’t have to look at the address to know who it was likely for. “--and don’t let them catch you. You’ve heard what they’ve started doing to the ones they catch.” 

~~

What was in the newspapers was that Spain had fallen to Franco. 

What was  _ not  _ in the newspapers was Antonio, filthy and starving, firing his gun in the streets of Madrid to lead them away from the small caravan of escapees. 

What was  _ not  _ in the news was how Gilbert stayed at the back of the line, gun at ready, a ghost ready to make ghosts of more. 

What  _ was _ in the newspapers was Antonio Fernandez Carriedo in handcuffs, dark hair crusted with blood, cheeks stained with tears, and his eyes filled with rage. They were sunk far back into his face, burning fiercely -- hunger had made him more a haunted skull than a man. 

What did not make the newspapers was what he said when an officer tried to tell him that real men didn’t cry over their losses: 

“I’m not a good person. I’m not weeping for myself -- this is a fate I earned many centuries ago. I’m weeping for everyone else.” 

~~

Francis should have expected Gilbert to show up, given what Antonio had told him, but hadn’t expected someone on the run from multiple regimes to show up in the middle of Paris. Then again, Francis knew very few people -- nation and human alike -- with Gilbert’s audacity. 

“I need a favor.” 

“You need to  _ lower your damn voice and get inside, _ ” Francis hissed, ushering him into his apartment. He lived right on top of a starving artist bistro on Rue des Abbesses -- who  _ knew  _ what types had seen Gilbert come in?! And how did Gilbert know he was still living here? He didn’t want to hear the answer, which was that Gilbert knew well enough that Francis was, above all, a creature of severe habit. 

“Have you even been trying to lay low, or are you just dropping in on everyone you’ve ever had a good relationship with prior and hoping for the best?” 

“I mean...I got past you all once. That whole Maginot thing you’ve got going on really isn’t worth the effort.” 

“We can’t fight another war. Our best bet is to weather the storm,” Francis said, sinking back down into his armchair. “Whatever’s to come, it’ll be over quickly, no?” 

“That’s what people said about the Great War and the Spanish Flu.” 

“Don’t remind me. What do you want, so I can give it to you and you can get the hell out of my house before you start a diplomatic incident?” 

“Fake ID. Passport. Papers. Make me a Frenchman.” 

_ Add that to the list of things I never thought I’d hear Gilbert say, right up there with “Vegetarianism is the way forward” and “no, please, tell me all about your opinions on opera”.  _

“Consider it done -- Câlins, don’t --”

The little black French bulldog was already in Gilbert’s lap.  _ Oh, I missed you, you little freak. Do you still like back scratches? Oh, yes you do, huh.  _

“Does Antonio still have that little Chihuahua?” 

“César? I didn’t see him -- I imagine he got him out of harm’s way. Or he finally got squashed by someone  _ else’s  _ dog.” 

“Figures.” 

With Gilbert sitting across from him and making moon eyes at his pet, Francis could almost forget that Gil had given him several centuries’ worth of things to dislike him for. Almost. 

“You’ll be out by morning?” 

“If you get me papers by then, yes.”

“Where to?” 

Gilbert’s mind immediately went to who was next on the potential chopping block to make way for the brand-new, shambling Germany. 

“Poland, probably.” 

~~

Feliks was waiting for Francis or Arthur to let him know if -- and when -- they were going to call anyone’s bluff. Based on what he’d seen out of Spain and out of Czechoslovakia, he felt with each passing moment that there wasn’t one in the first place. 

Someone had been translating a certain island nation’s radio broadcasts into English and forwarding them on a wider reaching signal -- they had gotten far up enough north that he was getting news from them.  _ It’s like they don’t even care if we know what they want to do to us. Like they know nothing will happen to them.  _

He disliked how adept at speaking Polish little Hana had gotten. What was once the occasional word game -- “What is this in Slovakian? What is it in Polish?” -- upon his return home after work were now becoming full sentences. Any other context where his niece would be interested in learning more about him and his language would be welcome, but most of their conversations went like this: 

“Where is mama?” 

“She’s gone away -- she had to go away for a little while with your papa, but she will be back soon for you.” 

“When?”

“We don’t know, Hana. She’ll tell me when she knows.” 

“And you’ll tell me?” 

“Yes, my love.” 

Not a word from either of her parents in a long time. The last he had heard was from Stefan -- a telegram when they reached Bratislava that said “they’re looking for me”. That had been long ago. And nothing from Anja whatsoever.  _ Why did they separate you, Stefan? Surely this “Slovak Republic” and this fighting with Hungary wasn’t your idea? That’s not like you at all.  _

Actually, come to think of it, Stefan had never liked Erzsi all that much. But the point still stood. 

He was sitting down for his 3 o’clock cigarette, glued to his radio (as opposed to his 2:30 PM, 2:00 PM, et cetera cigarettes, while also glued to his radio) when he got a knock at his door. Opening it, he was surprised to see two armed guards. 

“We found someone trying to break into your office downtown.” 

_ Why do I feel like that’s not the only part of this story?  _

“He said he knew you and demanded to know where you were. We were asked to come fetch you so you could identify him.” 

_ There it is.  _

He scooped up Hana -- he didn’t trust nannies, not with her, at any rate -- and went with his escort, certain it was one of many desperate people trying to get by whatever way they could. Maybe he could get them food -- he was lacking in cash these days himself, but he knew what it was like to -- 

All of his feelings of goodwill vanished when he saw who exactly was handcuffed to his desk. 

Gilbert looked awful, but not awful enough for Feliks to be concerned for his well-being. Not yet. He had watched him bounce back from far worse in a matter of days. 

“Who’s the kid?” 

Feliks chose not to answer, mainly because he knew that Gilbert knew exactly whose child Hana was. Anyone familiar with this side of the Danube would notice the undeniable resemblance little Hana had to her mother. Her presence in Warsaw remained an open secret, mainly because of the tacit understanding of why she was away from her parents in the first place. 

“Leave me to speak with him alone, please.” 

“We’ve been ordered to--”

“ _ Please.  _ I will not ask again.” He looked down at Hana and then back up to the bigger guard between the two of them. “Watch her -- I can handle myself. And if something happens, she’ll need more help than I would.” 

The officer nodded, and the two went off with the toddler into the hallway. 

Feliks waited for the door to click shut before silently counting to fifteen. Gilbert knew well enough what kind of business Feliks meant when he was quiet, and braced for impact. 

The Pole did not disappoint. 

“You fucking  _ bedbug,  _ fucking  _ vermin,  _ first they blame us for you vanishing without a trace on the other side of the continent from us, and then you conveniently show up at my doorstep, call yourself an  _ old friend _ ! What a clever little trick that is! I’ve got your Aryan freak of a little brother at my doorstep on one end and Ivan Braginsky poised to go clean up my ass and through my mouth if I make one wrong move, and you come in like you deserve even an  _ ounce  _ of my fucking attention and give both of them every reason to come swooping in to chop me to pieces  _ a-fucking-gain _ \--”

“I’m sorry, Feliks.”

“Don’t you fucking ‘I’m sorry’ me, Gilbert, if you were sorry you would have never shown your inbred, smug little face in my fucking city! If you don’t fucking get your bony, entitled, ugly ass out of my capitol I’ll...I’ll...do you know how cramped it is in a saint’s relic box? Do you? Do you know what it’s like to exist in twelve places simultaneously?” 

“Feliks, would you  _ please  _ just let me explain--”

“I should have you hanged -- you know what? Fine. Give me one reason why I shouldn’t turn you around and put a bullet in your head right this minute.” 

“It would set a bad example for your niece.” 

He had to keep from saying  _ fuck you, you orphaned her  _ before realizing that in spite of everything that would imply he was the mastermind behind all of this, it couldn’t be. 

“Where did you go in the first place?” 

“Spain, to help Antonio. I escaped Madrid while it fell to Franco. I got a fake ID from Francis when I went back through France. And now I’m here, if you’ll have me.” 

“How did you get here from Madrid?” 

“Went through France, like I said, and then I came up north and took a boat from the Netherlands to Gdansk. Then I jumped a train and came down here.” Gilbert didn’t feel the need to elaborate on how the Baltic was now easily 2% his own vomit. That was the price the fish had to pay for his freedom. 

“Why here?” 

“I heard about Anja and Stefan. And then I’ve been hearing rumors about what they’re doing to Antonio in that prison. I don’t think it should happen to you -- it sets a bad example.” 

“So it’s not an ideological thing -- for you, at least. You’re not a Fascist, and you’re not a Nazi, and you’re not a communist.” 

“I...has everyone forgotten we’re not supposed to take sides politically?” 

“If one side is threatening to kill you and people who are like you, is it not impossible to not “side” with the people who don’t want you dead?” 

“I think that it’s important to...wait, what’s the word in Polish?”

“For what?” 

“ _ Sachlichkeit _ ?” 

“ _ Faktyczność _ ,” Feliks replied out of force of habit, before realizing that they had been having this entire conversation in Polish. Meaning…

“When did your Polish get so....”

“Good? I have a confession to make.” 

“I’m listening.” 

“Many years ago, I got irritated with how I didn’t know what you and Toris were saying, or if you were talking behind my back about something. That and wanting to read Stefan Banach’s research notes...well...I decided it was time I learned a new language.” 

“What, German, French, English, Latin, Italian, Russian, and Hebrew weren’t good enough for you?” 

“No.”

“I don’t know whether to feel flattered or violated, but…you might be of use to me yet.”

“Do you want me to translate things?” 

“Yes. If you know anything about coded transmissions, any secrets at all, I need you to give them to us. Our only hope is to stay just far enough ahead of them that we don’t get hit if they fall.” 

Gilbert knew better than to ask Feliks if he had a plan. 

“Do you trust me like that?” 

“Not yet. But just enough that I might listen to you.” 

If Francis and Arthur knew that Gilbert was here, would they send aid? Clearly it wasn’t enough for it to just be Feliks in trouble. 

~~

Half of a nation’s job was being locked in a small room with another one of your kind while both of you were in full dress uniforms. This emboldened some and irritated many. 

Ivan was in one corner of the room, quietly knitting. Ludwig was standing in the middle of it at parade rest, wishing he had Feliciano with him to break the seven inch thick wall of ice between them. He could be  _ very  _ persuasive -- it was one of the things Ludwig liked most about him. 

Instead, Ludwig decided to try his best at diplomacy. 

“Can I share a drink with you in honor of making Poland not exist anymore?” 

_ I’m not drinking with you.  _

“I’m fasting, so no thank you,” Ivan lied. Ludwig sat next to him nevertheless. 

“One thing I’d like to ask you, if I have your ear, is about my brother. He vanished when he went to the Rhineland -- we think some extremist group of Finns or Poles, or some kind of Soviet offshoot group, may have been involved with his disappearance. We’ve been in possession of Anja Jahoda, the Czech nation, for a while now. Stefan Kovac, the Slovakian nation, finally turned up -- but we don’t know where their baby is. We think the people who abducted my brother and abducted Hana Kovac might be collaborating. Do you have any idea about any of that?” 

Ivan put down his knitting and leaned his face up into his palm, resting his elbows on the table. He looked relaxed. He did not look friendly. 

“You know I’m a Jew, right?” 

Based on how the little color therein left Ludwig’s face, Ivan assumed that little piece of information had not made it into whatever information briefing he’d had before they had signed the non-aggression pact. 

“And you know the only thing keeping me from uncorking your head from your neck is this formality currently…” Ivan’s English was failing as an expense of maintaining his composure. “...unfurling?” 

Ludwig nodded gingerly. 

“Good. I want to make something very clear to you. I don’t care what our leaders decide.  _ We _ are not friends. We are not allies, nor are we comrades, nor are we co-conspirators in any capacity. Do not ask me for favors, and do not ask me for information. Likewise, I will not ask for either of those of you, as there is absolutely nothing you could give to me that would be of any material value that outweighs who and what you are to me, which is below the level of a ringworm.” 

“Very well. Understood.” 

“And when you goose-step your way out of the Soviet Union’s good graces, God help you. Because I will not.” 

~~

Of course, when there was any sort of raid on a Resistance hideout, the aftermath greatly resembled that of insects running after their rock was overturned. It was then the police’s job to pick them off, one by one. 

Did they know she was here? She doubted it -- if they  _ really _ wanted to bring her to Rome, they could have sent Feli or Lovino. This, more than anything, was a battle of attrition. What Il Duce had not accounted for was that Serafina -- and the Sicilian people as a whole -- had spent over two thousand years perfecting the art of stubbornness. They had waited out many other occupations before his. He was not special. 

But all that aside, she wasn’t about to stick around and get her sisters in arms in even  _ more  _ trouble for harboring a fugitive. 

Sicilian children are often told about the  _ marabbecca _ \-- a creature that lives inside wells and pulls in children who dare to play near them, devouring them. Serafina did not fear it enough to keep from jumping down the well. What she  _ hadn’t  _ been expecting was hitting stone instead of water. When she regained consciousness, she kept silent, taking note of the commotion above: 

“Only three accounted for? They have to be here  _ somewhere! _ ”

She maintained the same complete silence while her body continued to knit together -- humans didn’t seem to realize that the process of healing quickly had an unpleasant sensation on its own, as does returning back from the dead.

She lay on her side and contemplated the dark in front of her, punctuated by the light that filtered in from between the wooden planks above her. She realized the depth of the black in front of her wasn’t solid enough to indicate a wall. Unless her eyes were playing tricks on her (very possible-- she couldn’t remember the last night she had slept peacefully through till morning), it looked like this might be a tunnel. 

Could she stand yet? She tried shifting her weight onto her knees.  _ Yes, finally.  _ Serafina reached into her pocket and grabbed her miraculously unbroken cigarette lighter, pressing down to get a little light. She shielded the tiny flame with her hand and reached out towards where the wall should be: air. 

_ If these are tunnels, then there should be a way out other than climbing up to the surface,  _ she mused, continuing forward down the path and coming into what...a room? 

The small glow of the lighter did a great deal to illuminate the boxes and boxes of weapons and ammunition within. Serafina squinted to try and make out the tiny print on each box -- someone had written out what the contents were on each one.  _ Rifles -- _

The sound of boots on stone interrupted any kind of deciphering she could accomplish, and she released her thumb from the lighter before she ducked behind a stack of boxes. 

“This seems a little excessive -- what was the reasoning behind this again?” 

“For easy access when Italy invades Malta. More of a precaution, really.” 

_ WHEN?!? _

“Don’t you think they’ll catch on when they realize all the wells have run dry?” 

“No, then we tell them to get water from the reservoirs instead, so we have decent headcounts of everyone in the area and we don’t have to knock door to door.” 

“What if they have plumbing?”

“Then it goes to the reservoir anyway, dipshit.” 

“And if we help them do this, they’ll let our  _ capo _ out of jail?” 

“So they say.” 

“Seems too easy.” 

“There’s probably more we gotta do. I didn’t ask too many questions.” 

“See, that’s why they like you.” 

“Nah, they like me because I’ve got money. They don’t like you because you’re stupid and your mother’s a whore.” 

“Shut up.” 

Serafina remembered Feliciano’s warning about their plan to poison the reservoir in Palermo If she didn’t surrender in a timely, orderly fashion -- that was years ago. After all this time, no one had fallen sick -- at least, not from poisoning. Were they planning on finally making good on that promise, just on a wider scale?

_ Leave it to mainland bureaucracy to follow through on a threat from half a decade ago,  _ she mused. 

“And it’s just one more load and we’re done, right?” 

“Yep.” 

“They say Serafina’s prowling around this part of the island -- wonder if we’ll run into her. I heard the reward to bring her in is a million lire.”

“That reminds me...I heard a good one the other day. What’s Serafina Pavone’s favorite cheese?”

“I dunno.”

“Gorgon-zola.” 

“Pietro, that’s fuckin’ terrible--”

Serafina laughed in spite of herself. 

“...shit, did you hear that?” 

She covered her mouth.  _ Rookie move, you should know better!  _

“I think it came from down the hall. Come on!” 

As the two went towards the spot she had fallen, Serafina escaped through the tunnel whence they had come in. 

Malta, huh? She had sent Salvatore anything since her resurrection -- she assumed that as an Englishman and as a grown man with pressing issues of his own, blowing her cover just to tell him she was alive was a bad idea. 

Perhaps a note was long overdue. It wouldn’t have been the first time she was wrong about other people’s opinion of her. When she finally made it back to her hideout, she grabbed a pen and paper. 


	6. Incursion

Spiro still spent a lot of time at Salvatore’s house in Valletta, given how far away his own home territory was. Salvatore did not mind the company, so he did not question it. Spiro shuffled through Salvatore’s mail as he walked through the front door. 

“You’ve got a letter, darling.” 

“I wasn’t expecting any mail.” 

Spiro handed him the thin envelope. 

“No return address, but it’s from a...?” Spiro tried his best to pronounce it before Salvatore, with a small smile, said “K. Għaqli.” 

Salvatore squinted at the postage stamp to--No. No, there was no way. Could it...

“ _ Min jistenna jithenna, _ ” Salvatore breathed. Spiro tilted his head in confusion. 

“One who waits is rewarded,” he explained in English. He opened the envelope and squinted. Oh,  _ this _ was his sister’s handwriting, all right: 

_ Sasà,  _

_ 1Ch14:9 Ro12:910 _




“ _ Qalbi _ ? Where’s my bible?” 

“On your desk -- I’ll go grab it. Anything we should tell Arthur about?” 

“Not sure.” 

The book had been open on Salvatore’s desk at the Song of Songs. “Sappy,” Spiro muttered, handing it over to his lover and pretending it didn’t make his stomach squeeze a little. 

“You’d think I’d know the order off the top of my head by now,” Salvatore licked his fingers and flipped through the thin pages to the table of contents. 

“I’m surprised you don’t have one in every room...you know, for light reading.” 

“ _ There’s  _ an idea. Alright...1 Ch can only refer to First Chronicles. 1 Chronicles 14:9 would be…” Salvatore flipped back through the Old Testament; his heavy finger finally fell upon the verse. 

“ _ And the Philistines came and spread themselves in the valley of Rephaim _ ,” Spiro read aloud. 

“The second one has to be Romans 12:9-10, and I know that by heart: Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor.”

Salvatore shut his Bible and his jaw set. 

“ _ K. Għaqli. _ Philistines in Rephaim.” He looked up. “And after all these years without writing to me. It’s a warning. I think she’s trying to say they’re finally planning to invade.” 

“If we call Arthur about this, do you think anything would be done?”

“Meaning, would he go to war if Mussolini decided to finally park his big chin in our living room?” 

“Yes.” 

“Czechoslovakia and Poland aren’t their problem -- too far away, so it’s easy to be lenient. And that’s why the French and the Italians were so comfortable with each other in North Africa the moment they agreed to mind their own business, and why all they did when Mussolini gassed Ethiopia was wag their fingers at most. But  _ us?  _ We’re key ports for the Royal Navy. Invading would be a direct threat to the interests of the Crown.” 

“But…?” 

“But if we tell Arthur to start sending us more weapons, make it obvious that we know what they’re planning, it might make things worse -- not to mention how many alarm bells it would ring if they stationed the Navy here again after all that fuss about moving to Egypt. We don’t know where my sister even  _ is --  _ I don’t want to risk exposing her by acting too rashly.” 

“We need to tell someone, Salvatore. She wouldn’t have sent you that, after all this time, just for us to waste that information.” 

“I need...to go for a walk. Where is Pepe?” 

Salvatore couldn’t say that this news was unexpected -- the Maltese people had been expecting as much ever since the English had rearranged the priority of the Royal Navy’s bases. Scores of foreigners had already started to filter off the island. How many of these Englishmen would remain when the bombs started to fall? How many would leave the few true Maltese to fend for themselves? 

He and Pepe finally made it to a phone booth -- Pepe was walking slower these days. 

“Operator, how much to make a call to Ajaccio?” 

This was, of course, a foolish question -- Salvatore was ready to pay any amount. And so he did. 

“‘Lo?” 

Salvatore didn’t know one could convey a hangover in one syllable. 

“Andria? Got a minute?” 

“Talk to me, little man.” 

~~

Andria was never one to fear for his life while on the ocean, but his times working in Genoese galleys and the Navy were mainly before the advent of submarines. Getting to Valletta had been one thing; returning to his home had been another entirely. 

The news from Salvatore was not a surprise. They’d been building fortifications between his island and his brother’s for quite some time now. What was more concerning was the absolute silence from anyone who might be able to do something about it -- Salvatore and Spiro were right to not put faith in Arthur.

_ “Salvatore, before I go…I want you to have this.”  _

_ His baby cousin hefted the dagger in his hands.  _

_ “These markings…” _

_ “This was Uncle’s mjannyut blade. One of the few that survived the Romans. Your sister gave it to me for safekeeping, but he’d want you to have it.”  _

_ “What, to protect me during a land invasion? These days? On my little island?” _

_ “Do what you will with it. It’s your birthright.”  _

When he arrived in Bastia, he knew well enough who he could talk to and where: public statements or press releases, as always, were not an option for someone like him, but personal phone calls? Telegrams? Fair game. 

And, of course, meetings with those who he could trust. No Frenchmen were included. 

“I just got some...worrying news from nearby. I’m not at liberty to say more than that, but I want to make one thing very clear before anything escalates: we do not collaborate with the Italians. We avoid them the same way we avoid collaborating with the French. Understood?” 

Some he spoke to in particular had one strong objection: “What about the union with Italy?” 

“No. I don’t want to hear it, and I don’t care who has what to say about our origins or on how we’d be better off as Italians. To ally with Italy, to broker with the Fascists, is to ally, in my eyes, with their German bedfellows.” 

“That’s crazy talk.” 

“Have you  _ read _ the news lately? Read the room. Nobody could let Mussolini in without also eventually letting in Hitler. Giovanna was Jewish. If you betray your Jewish countrymen to either of them, you not only send fellow Corsicans to a fate crueler than anything we could possibly understand, but it means you would betray her and, therefore, you would betray  _ me. _ ”

He paused -- those elsewhere knew what that pause meant, and those who had the luxury of being in his presence saw how he loomed, heavy and hurting. 

“We close ranks and we protect our own, the same way we always have. Not a word to any foreigner who asks, from any of you, or I will make sure it haunts you for the rest of your days. Do you understand?” 

“Yes.” 

“I said,  _ do you understand? _ ”

“ _ YES! _ ” 

~~

Gilbert didn’t need to tell Feliks that it wasn’t a question of  _ if,  _ but a question of  _ when.  _ He did anyway -- all the swearing to secrecy in the world couldn’t hide most from seeing where the tide was turning. If England wanted to plug her ears and bury her head in the sand, that was her choice. Gilbert, having sat in enough meetings with Adolf, knew full well that appeasement was but a dream. 

“Hitler’s not making any appearances. He’s been locked in the Chancellery, working.” 

Feliks, far more sensible than he had been in years past, did not like the sound of that. 

“Any word about your little friend from Vienna?”

“Shut up.” 

None. Roderich hadn’t been seen since Schuschnigg had addressed his people after the Anschluss. Something wasn’t right. Even Venice kept his brother and the Sardinian around after the March on Rome -- surely, Ludwig wouldn’t....

He had to remind himself that yes, these days, Ludwig probably  _ would. _

“Maybe they’ll just focus on Danzig?” Feliks said hopefully. “I can part with Danzig, if I must.” 

They both knew this was far from the realm of possibility. 

“They said that about Anja too, and then they came after Stefan and the little one asleep in the next room. You need to be ready to leave if you must.” 

“I can’t leave my people.” 

“You might not have a  _ choice,  _ Feliks.” 

“You think it’s true? The rumors about the laboratories?” 

“...what rumors?” 

Feliks was trying very hard to keep his hands from shaking while he brought his cigarette up to his lips. 

“They’re taking conquered nations and putting them in shuttered off hospitals to figure out why we heal fast, why we can’t die, so that they can make soldiers like us.” 

“We get our power from the earth we represent. It’s given to us, and in return we steward the land and its people. If we stray from that purpose or reject it, we lose those powers. I thought that was common knowledge.” 

“That’s the pagan way, yes.” It took a great deal for Feliks to admit  _ anything _ about him was pagan these days. “But we’re in the age of science, Gilbert. And if what I’ve heard is true, if they catch you, they pull the science clean out of you.” 

~~

It was a beautiful night and Feliciano was more than ready to be seen enjoying it. He cut a fine figure in his new suit, soft face freshly shaved and washed after being let back home for a brief reprieve from the front. He was glowing, blessing all those who approached him with his typical squinty, boyish smile. Ludwig was with him this time around -- they saved their embraces for when they were acceptably out of sight. 

Feliciano had a peculiar quality, one that he had gotten from his father, of being able to walk into a room and draw the attention of everyone in it. At parties, people flocked to him like gulls to an unattended seaside picnic basket. Tonight was no exception. 

“You lot are such a peculiar bunch -- it’s been decades, and it seems you’re the only one who’s decided to get with the times. I don’t know whether or not I should be worried or if my feelings should be hurt.” 

Feliciano had the breezy answer that served to soothe. Ludwig sat back and watched the master at work. 

“You’ll have to forgive my family -- you understand, many of us were around for and fought for those same socialist ideals that are out of vogue now. It’s hard to let go. Those are deep wounds, and one lifetime for you is a blink of an eye for us. My brother nearly died during the Risorgimento, and many of my fellow Northerners perished for the cause of democracy.” 

“That’s  _ right... _ I forgot that there were those others.”

“You didn’t ever see that photo from 1848? We were all there.” 

“Never really paid attention in my history lessons.”

“Fair.” 

“ You’re really the only Northerner left?”

“Yes.”

“Lucky fellow.” 

The faces of Bartò, Carlo, Simone, Adriana, and Tristana flashed through his mind. He tried to imagine what they would think about the new Italy. Had Italians truly forgotten about them? Had it been that long? This minister was getting rather comfortable talking about nations. It didn’t bother Feliciano that much…yet.

“I wish your brother would grace us with his presence.” 

“Like I said, deep wounds. Maybe someday.” 

“And that Sardinia never comes around, either. You don’t think he’s up to something?”

“Hard to tell. I was surprised when he offered to help interpret for Count Ciano earlier--” Feliciano decided to practice a bit of discretion and not mention the  _ other  _ human Antine seemed to take a shine to. “He’s never been all that right in the head — as long as I’ve known him, anyhow.”

Feliciano was beginning to attract a bit of a crowd, as he was wont to do whenever people heard him talking about their history. 

“Was he always like that? Those island folk aren’t always the most…savory characters.”

“They say…” Feliciano leaned forward to address the small group, swirling his Campari for emphasis. “…they  _ say _ , mind you, I was only a baby when this happened so I was only  _ told _ this, that he and his brother were difficult enough to deal with together that my father decided he would only keep one after buying both as slaves. So he sent Sardinia back and kept his brother--”

“What, by post?”

Feliciano laughed. 

“Yes, smacked a little “return to sender” stamp on his forehead and sent him on his way. But…”  _ Should he tell this part of the story? _

Yes. Absolutely. Everyone here loved Romulus stories. 

“Normally, if you were too difficult a slave and you were a human, you got killed. But what can you do to someone who can’t die? My father had already executed Sardinia’s uncle, Carthage. His mother was his concubine, sealed far away from where her sons were supposed to be working. And his people were rowdy, angry -- the culling of even  _ one  _ Sardinian nation might cause an uprising, especially when he was still only a child.” 

“We use the term “child” loosely, eh?” 

“Age and maturity for us are different. I was older than most, but I was a child, immature, for many,  _ many  _ centuries -- I had the experience that went with being so old, but I still had the mind and body of a primary schooler and often acted accordingly. So, yes, he  _ was _ a child -- maybe one savvier than most, but still a child.” 

“And so your father sent the boy home?” 

“Put him in a little vessel and put him out to sea. And put it upon his twin brother to do the work of both of them, yes.” 

He left out the part where Sardinia, as Nuragic as he was Phoenician, was just as likely to sink in the water as he was to feel at home in it. 

“Far more merciful than I was expecting.” 

“The next time anyone saw Antine, it was hundreds of years later. He was a starved, feral boy out in the hills of his island. He had been found by the indigenous people, the barbarians, and was raised by them, had practically forgotten everything about his other family.”

“Who found him?”

“A Spaniard, I believe— at least I think it was Anto--Castile, excuse me--”  _ Could he still talk about Antonio in a favorable light, after everything that had happened? “... _ but it was all so long ago. He fell into the hands of the Aragonese, and then the Austrians for a bit...nobody really wanted to deal with him, as I understand. Difficult fellow.” 

“Good with knives, or so I hear.” 

“Oh, excellent aim. I don’t know if you were paying attention at the time, but you wouldn’t  _ believe  _ how daring Antine was during the Great War. He has  _ dozens  _ of medals for his service, but you’d never guess from how he talks about it.”

“I should ask him one of these days.” 

“Can’t stress it enough.  _ Excellent  _ marksman. Next time you go hunting, you should ask him to tag along.”

“I’m trying to look good,” Filippo joked. “The last thing I need for my ego is some Sard in my hunting party knifing a boar from 500 meters away.” 

“He puts me to shame.” 

“And you’re no slouch yourself,” interrupted Ludwig. 

“This always surprises people, but one of the best out of all of us was Lovino before he got the shakes after the Roman Republic fell. Only one person out of all of us was a better shot than him. So you know what he did?”

“He killed him?”

“Beat him in a target contest?” 

“No, get this, the dumb bastard, he  _ married _ her, and then after the Spanish invaded he never picked up a gun again.” 

This was enough to get the entire group to burst out laughing. 

~~

It was just enough that Warsaw was holding out -- that was all Feliks could hope for, evacuating as many of his countrymen as he could, as quickly and quietly as possible, while hurling as many grenades over his shoulder as he could carry. He would weep for his houses, his cathedrals, his streets, later. 

“London,” they agreed. He would be amongst the last to go join the rest of the exiles. 

_ Gil, if you don’t hear back from me, take Hana, take the automobile, and get as far as you possibly can. She has fake papers in there. _

He didn’t have time to think about where they might go, just that they got out. 

Occupations manifested in him as blisters across his shoulders and on the back of his hands. He wore gloves and a heavy coat to hide the leakage from onlookers. 

The ringing in his ears meant that he didn’t hear the plane overhead, didn’t think as to how close he was to the railway station when the bomb dropped, when it turned a feat of human engineering into a nest of projectiles. 

Somehow that lack of awareness did not make being impaled by a shard of a former train track hurt any less. Feliks lay face up, pinned to his city like a beetle on a mount, bleeding his way into motionlessness. The endless scrawl of planes in the sky was the last thing he saw before he lost consciousness. 

_ Gil, I hope you’re running.  _

Gil couldn’t remember the last time he had ever ran from the wreckage of a city with a screaming child in his arms. Hana was thrashing about, waxing and waning between languages Gilbert did and didn’t understand

_ Where to, now that you’ve failed to help a resistance twice? _

He needed to go someplace where he was not needed and where no one would think to look. 

The tatters of a yellow-framed magazine fluttered in front of him. 

_ Yes.  _

~~

Lovino was having dreams interspersed with mustard gas, poisoned water, and an image of his long dead father-in-law holding a little boy with curly black hair and downturned hazel eyes. 

Because of Feliciano’s eagerness, Lovino was more or less the nation who was expected to maintain the home front while his brother went off in an airplane and committed atrocities in the name of a new Roman Empire. 

Feliciano had taken some time off from the front and was back to his old dinner parties with his Futurist friends -- some he’d met in Paris, many he’d maintained correspondence with while still living in Rome. 

“Beny told the funniest story about something that happened when she went over to Como for the weekend a few weeks back -- I swear, she and Nina would get along so well --” 

_ Fair point, providing that Benedetta Cappa would stop talking about the superiority of the white race.  _

“You’re always missed, Lovino. When are you going to grace them with your presence? He’s been in this office for what, nearly twenty years, and you haven’t once gone for a drink with him? I usually mind my business, but it’s unavoidable.” 

Lovino, per usual, tried to find the objection he had to keeping Mussolini and his cohort’s company that would offend his brother the least. 

“I don’t keep company with any man who speaks to or about his wife the way he does.” Marinetti  _ almost  _ got a break on that front. Lovino had yet to forgive him for that stupid pamphlet he wrote about how to seduce women -- the bit where he said all women were propelled by their wombs more than their brains was exactly the time he had quietly folded the piece and locked it into his wood-burning stove. 

“Okay, Olympe de Gouges, that hasn’t stopped you before. It’s  _ rude. _ It’s not like you’re Sardinia; you represent half the mainland. Start acting like it.” 

“Sorry. I don’t find all the cocktail talk about art and womanizing as stimulating as I used to.” Had he ever? The last time he thought he might have had a good time at a party was some time after coming back from the front. He had gotten so drunk that he thought he could fly. 

“You can’t play the gloomy widower forever, you know. Especially if we finally bring You-Know-Who back into the fold.” 

So confident. That was what threw Lovino off the most about his brother these days. Standing so tall, straighter than he ever had.  _ Give a man with nothing something to believe in, and he’ll follow you to the ends of the earth.  _

“Think about it. That’s all.” 

~~

Gilbert was sitting with Hana in his lap and looking at a map of Europe, trying to see where he could conceivably follow the path that avoided as many Germans and Russians as possible. They had, miraculously, managed to get just out from the border from Slovakia without getting killed in cold blood. 

As it was, any German would recognize him on sight -- dead man or not. He had a knitted hat pulled tightly over his hair and wore glasses, but that could only do so much. 

Gilbert and Hana knew enough Polish to maintain a mutual understanding -- what Hana mostly understood was that, once again, she was being taken farther away from her parents than she had ever been before. 

“Where are we going?” 

“South. Hopefully to someone who can help us.” 

It had taken decades of meticulous instruction for a younger Ludwig to understand when and how he should speak to his older brother, and vice versa. Little Hana Kovac had no such training, and Gilbert was sufficiently out of practice. 

_ How much do I tell her? How much did Feliks tell her?  _

“Hana, did Feliks tell you where your mom and dad are?” 

“No.” 

“So...there’s...there’s someone who is taking people like us away, and we don’t know what they’re doing. So he came to take your parents, and they gave you to Feliks to protect you. And...he got hurt, and told me you had to come with me.

“Where are they?” 

“I don’t know, Hana.”

“Gilbert--”

“What?” 

He looked at her face and realized she had begun to cry. Fat, livid tears streaked down her round face, her mouth curling into a frightening oval. 

“I don’t  _ want  _ to go!” 

“Shh, shh, hey--”

Without thinking, he drew her to his chest, rhythmically rocking back and forth. Thankfully, a child crying right now didn’t draw  _ too  _ much attention. He lifted her up to look at her face, wiping the tears with a gloved hand. 

“Listen, Hana, right now, I need you to be very,  _ very  _ quiet, and I need you to be very brave. You will see your family again, but we need to get you away from the bad people first. But we need to move as fast as possible, or else they might not come back. Okay?” 

“Okay.” 

_ Let’s see how far this fake French passport can get me in the opposite direction. _

As he passed through the border checkpoint, he made eye contact with a man who looked so  _ very  _ much like Ludwig. 

~~

There was just enough left of Feliks’s apartment for Ivan to scour for information that might have helped with the evacuation. The Germans had already found Feliks, spirited him away to someplace they would not tell him any more about. He did not ask much, but already knew plenty -- if he asked too many questions, he already risked being sent there himself if his superiors got too many ideas. Unsurprisingly, Ivan did not find his presence to be a welcome one. 

He moved a few bricks with a heavy boot, only to find that the thing he thought had been a manila envelope was a teddy bear. 

_ Stefan and Anja’s baby.  _

Ivan jolted up from his knees, ripping through what remained.  _ Hair, blood, anything -- where is the child?  _

The only other things that he could find was a small pair of what looked like a toddler’s bloomers hanging by what was once the window, and the singed remains of a little wool coat by what had been the front door. 

Nothing. And no dust, either. If she was dead, she did not die here. 

He knelt down and took the teddy bear, brushing off the dust to get a look at it. It was missing a black glass eye -- a gift from an American or an Englishman, no doubt. 

He stuffed the bear into his pocket -- if Ludwig did not know she had been here, he certainly wouldn’t know now. 

Ivan took the coat and bloomers and set the two ablaze on the floor, kneeling down again to light his cigarette with the flames.  _ No trace. God be with you, little one.  _

Maybe in happier times he would be able to return the bear to her. 


End file.
